User Stories Research Articles

Overcoming Team Boundaries in Agile Software Development

: The usage of agile software development methods is increasing and so is the need for enhancing the collaboration between the different stakeholders. Thus, we chose to investigate the communication tools and challenges across the different boundaries and consequently deduce implications for practitioners. This research addresses inter-team communication by exploring the practitioners' perception on the different communication tools and the challenges faced at the three different boundaries, inter-team, team and customers, and geographically separated teams. We aim to enhance the productivity of software development through enhancing the communication between the different stakeholders. In this research, we use grounded theory approach to gather data from semi-structured open-ended interviews with practitioners in a geographically separated software development company. The findings observed three main inter-team communication means (Slack, Trello, face-to-face) used by practitioners, and how the preference differs among practitioners. This study also focuses on the different challenges faced, such as absence of communication during user story dependency, unclear customer requirements, and cultural differences, when implementing agile across different geographical locations. Our study discovers how team boundaries are overcome when team members adapt to other teams’ preferred communication tool and enhance the boundary spanners’ role. Furthermore, the study highlights how novice and mature teams require a transition time to adjust to the agile methods.

CAPTURING SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL ANALYSIS AND IMPROVEMENT

This paper considers the problem of software requirements capturing for business process model evaluation and recommendations generation to suggest how detected modeling errors may be eliminated in order to improve business process model correctness. Existing software tools for business process model analysis are based on metrics and thresholds that allow assume presence of errors in business process models, but they are not capable to recommend structural changes required to eliminate detected modeling errors. Therefore, business process model analysis and improvement tasks become relevant, since early detection and elimination of possible errors presented in business process models may allow organizations avoid extra costs that may occur on any of the steps of business process lifecycle. Since business process models are shared organizational assets, it is also necessary to consider the capabilities of collaborative and concurrent usage of business process models by multiple stakeholders. Hence, the workflow of business process model analysis and improvement was analyzed and its key steps, which describe expected user and software behavior, were formalized using the IDEF0 functional model. Functional software requirements were captured in the form of user stories according to modern agile practices of software development. These user stories are based on features and drawbacks of existing software tools for business process model analysis. Captured user stories were formalized using the use case modeling. Non-functional software requirements were also captured; they include maintainability, readability, testability, understandability, integrability, and complexity requirements. Captured requirements can be used to design and develop business process model analysis and improvement software capable to provide recommendations to eliminate detected modeling errors.

Editorial: Visualizing user experience and stories: From customer journeys to patient experience mapping

Patient journey mapping represents a visual approach to documenting and analysing the experiences and stories of patients as they move through healthcare systems. Journey maps can also diagrammatically illustrate how patients interact with other stakeholders, systems and organizations throughout their journey. In this special issue a variety of innovative and scientific approaches to mapping the patient journey are described. The methods range from development of journey maps based on observation and interviews, to developing maps based on results of evidence-based literature reviews as well as from case studies. The outputs of the mapping may include an improved understanding of patient experiences, issues and problems encountered as well as the identification of opportunities for improving the healthcare process, patient experience and health outcomes. In this issue a range of health-related applications are described in order to illustrate the potential of the approach for improving complex domains such as healthcare.

Implementation Science Meets Software Development to Create eHealth Components for an Integrated Care Model for Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation Facilitated by eHealth: The SMILe Study as an Example.

To describe a process of creating eHealth components for an integrated care model using an agile software development approach, user-centered design and, via the Behavior Change Wheel, behavior theory-guided content development. Following the principles of implementation science and using the SMILe project (integrated care model for allogeneic stem cell transplantation facilitated by eHealth) as an example, this study demonstrates how to narrow the research-to-practice gap often encountered in eHealth projects. We followed a four-step process: (a) formation of an interdisciplinary team; (b) a contextual analysis to drive the development process via behavioral theory; (c) transfer of content to software following agile software development principles; and (d) frequent stakeholder and end user involvement following user-centered design principles. Our newly developed comprehensive development approach allowed us to create a running eHealth component and embed it in an integrated care model. An interdisciplinary team's collaboration at specified interaction points supported clear, timely communication and interactions between the specialists. Because behavioral theory drove the content development process, we formulated user stories to define the software features, which were prioritized and iteratively developed using agile software development principles. A prototype intervention module has now been developed and received high ratings on the System Usability Scale after two rounds of usability testing. Following an agile software development process, structured collaboration between nursing scientists and software specialists allowed our interdisciplinary team to develop meaningful, theory-based eHealth components adapted to context-specific needs. The creation of high-quality, accurately fitting eHealth components specifically to be embedded in integrated care models should increase the chances of uptake, adoption, and sustainable implementation in clinical practice.

User Story Estimation Based on the Complexity Decomposition Using Bayesian Networks

Currently, in Scrum, there are different methods to estimate user stories in terms of effort or complexity. Most of the existing techniques consider factors in a fine grain level; these techniques are not always accurate. Although Planning Poker is the most used method in Scrum to estimate user stories, it is primarily effective in experienced teams since the estimation mostly depends on the observation of experts, but it is difficult when is used by inexperienced teams. In this paper, we present a proposal for complexity decomposition in a coarse grain level, in order to consider important factors for complexity estimation. We use a Bayesian network to represent those factors and their relations. The edges of the network are weighted with the judge of professional practitioners about the importance of the factors. The nodes of the network represent the factors. During the user estimation phase, the Scrum team members introduce the values for each factor; in this way, the network generates a value for the complexity of a User story, which is transformed in a Planning Poker card number, which represents the story points. The purpose of this research is to provide to development teams without experience or without historical data, a method to estimate the complexity of user stories through a model focused on the human aspects of developers.

ABCDE—agile block chain DApp engineering

Blockchain software development is becoming more and more important for any modern software developer and IT startup. Nonetheless, blockchain software production still lacks a disciplined, organized and mature development process, as demonstrated by the many and (in)famous failures and frauds occurred in recent years. In this paper we present ABCDE, a complete method addressing blockchain software development. The method considers the software integration among the blockchain components—smart contracts, libraries, data structures—and the out-of-chain components, such as web or mobile applications, which all together constitute a complete DApp system. We advocate for ABCDE the use of agile practices, because these are suited to develop systems whose requirements are not completely understood since the beginning, or tend to change, as it is the case of most blockchain-based applications. ABCDE is based on Scrum, and is therefore iterative and incremental. From Scrum, we kept the requirement gathering with user stories, the iterative-incremental approach, the key roles, and the meetings. The main difference with Scrum is the separation of development activities in two flows—one for smart contracts and the other for out-of-chain software interacting with the blockchain—each performed iteratively, with integration activities every 2–3 iterations. ABCDE makes explicit the activities that must be performed to design, develop, test and integrate smart contracts and out-of-chain software, and documents the smart contracts using formal diagrams to help development, security assessment, and maintenance. A diagram derived from UML class diagram helps to effectively model the data structure of smart contracts, whereas the exchange of messages between the entities of the system is modeled using a modified UML sequence diagram. The proposed method has also specific activities for security assessment and gas optimization, through systematic use of patterns and checklists. ABCDE focuses on Ethereum blockchain and its Solidity language, but preserves generality and with proper modifications might be applied to any blockchain software project. ABCDE method is described in detail, and an example is given to show how to concretely implement the various development steps.

Images of Recovery: A PhotoVoice Study on Visual Narratives of Personal Recovery in Persons with Serious Mental Illness.

Personal recovery has become a guiding paradigm in mental health services. Most research on recovery is based on the exploration of personal stories of service users through verbal methods. As not everyone with psychiatric problems is able to verbally formulate a recovery narrative, the current study assesses personal recovery through PhotoVoice, with emphasis on visualisation, small stories and participation. Two ten-week groups were conducted with 18 participants living with severe mental illnesses. They participated in both the collection and analysis of visual narratives. Across the images produced by participants, four main recovery themes were found : People, Places, Activities and Finding Meaning. Compared to other frameworks, the emphasis participants put on the theme Places adds value to the understanding of recovery processes. Furthermore, participants showed that recovery is about dealing with vulnerabilities as well as aspiring a meaningful life. This study demonstrates that exploring visual narratives is powerful within recovery oriented mental health.

Prioritization of IT Product Backlog Items Using Decision Support Systems

The article focuses on the application of decision support systems for prioritization of product backlog items in IT projects implemented using the Scrum methodology. The study identified the features of prioritization of different types of the product backlog items — user stories, epics and themes. It is justified that high-level product backlog items (epics and themes) require comprehensive prioritization, due to the following reasons. First, high-level product backlog items are particularly important because they determine the planning and implementation of detailed user stories within individual sprints. Second, any high-level item can be considered in terms of different criteria. Third, the implementation of epics and themes takes longer time compared to the implementation of user stories, so it is necessary to take into account possible future states of the project's environment. Fourth, prioritizing epics and themes requires increased objectivity and validity, so group decision making with participation of several experts seems reasonable. Taking into consideration the aforementioned features the conclusion regarding limitations of existing methods of prioritization is made. It is argued that prioritization of high-level product backlog items (epics and themes) may be performed using multi-criteria decision making methods with availability of several problem situations (possible future states of the environment), as well as involvement of several experts. The idea of applying decision support methods and systems is illustrated on the appropriate example. It is also argued that increased consumption of time and resources related with setting and solving decision support tasks may be considered as acceptable for high-level product backlog items.

On deriving conceptual models from user requirements: An empirical study

Abstract Context: There are numerous textual notations and techniques that can be used in requirements engineering. Currently, practitioners make a choice without having scientific evidence regarding their suitability for given tasks. This uninformed choice may affect task performance. Objective: In this research, we investigate the adequacy of two well-known notations: use cases and user stories, as a starting point for the manual derivation of a structural conceptual model that represents the domain of the system. We also examine other factors that may affect the performance of this task. Methods: This work relies on two experiments. The first is a controlled classroom experiment. The second one is a quasi-experiment, conducted over multiple weeks, that aims at evaluating the quality of the derived conceptual model in light of the notation used, the adopted derivation process, and the complexity of the system to be. We measure quality in terms of validity and completeness of the conceptual model. Results: The results of the controlled experiment indicate that, for deriving conceptual models, user stories fit better than use cases. Yet, the second experiment indicates that the quality of the derived conceptual models is affected mainly by the derivation process and by the complexity of the case rather than the notation used. Contribution: We present evidence that the task of deriving a conceptual model is affected significantly by additional factors other than requirements notations. Furthermore, we propose implications and hypotheses that pave the way for further studies that compare alternative notations for the same task as well as for other tasks. Practitioners may use our findings to analyze the factors that affect the quality of the conceptual model when choosing a requirements notation and an elicitation technique that best fit their needs.

Automatic summarising of user stories in order to be reused in future similar projects

User stories play an important role in agile development systems. In this study, a method of summarising user stories is proposed to reuse them in the future. To enhance the results, quality improvement should be made on user stories. It would help developers build better results, and it may also lead to omitting some essential information. To avoid such issues, user stories are duplicated in two exact similar groups, and quality improvement is made on one set while the other set remains unattained. With the help of a modified bag of words and a verb parser, a collection of keywords and key verbs are extracted for both groups. Afterwards, automatic user stories are made, and then an expert improves them. Next, some experts choose between the results and select the better ones. The result is evaluated by applying different experiments on the framework and prototype implementation on 14 data sets of a user story from industry and a fake data set from Duke University. The result showed 97% of micro F-measure and 93% of macro F-measure, which are promising. These new user stories can be used as the base user stories in future similar projects.

European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) as a Use Case for a Collection Descriptions Standard

The European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) is an e-service in development designed to improve access to natural history collections across Europe. Bringing together heterogeneous datasets about institutions, people, collections and specimens, ELViS will provide an e-service (with application programming interfaces (APIs) and portal) that handles various stages of collections-based research. One of the main functionalities of ELViS is to facilitate loan and visit requests related to collections. To facilitate activities such as searching for collections, requesting loans, generating reports on collection usage, and ensuring interoperability with existing and new systems and services, ELViS must use a standard way of describing collections. In this talk, I show how ELViS can use the Collection Descriptions (CD) standard currently being developed by the CD Task Group at TDWG. I will provide a brief introduction to ELViS, summarise the current development efforts, and show how the Collection Description standard can support specific user requirements (gathered via an extensive set of user stories). I will also provide insight into the data elements within ELViS (see Fig. 1) and how they relate to the Collection Description data model.

Requirements for computerized tools to design information security policies

Information security is a hot topic nowadays, and while top-class technology exists to safeguard information assets, organizations cannot rely on technical controls alone. Information security policy (ISP) is one of the most important formal controls when organizations work with implementing information security. However, designing ISPs is a challenging task for information security managers and to ease the burden, computerized tools have been suggested to support this design task. One important prerequisite for developing such tools is the requirements. However, existing research has, to a very limited extent, synthesized existing requirements. Against this backdrop, this study aims to elicit a set of requirements, anchored in existing ISP research, for computerized tools that support ISP design. First, we summarize existing ISP research into 14 requirement themes. Second, we suggest a set of user stories that operationalize these requirement themes from an information security manager's perspective. Third, we suggest another set of user stories that operationalize the same requirement themes from an ISP user's perspective. In total, we suggest 28 user stories that can act as a starting point for both researchers and practitioners when developing computerized tools that provide ISP design support for information security managers.

Geospatial Environments for Hurricane Risk Assessment: Applications to Situational Awareness and Resilience Planning in New Jersey

Mitigation of losses due to coastal hazards has become an increasingly urgent and challenging problem in light of rising seas and the continued escalation of coastal population density. Unfortunately, stakeholders responsible for assuring the safety of these coastal communities are not equipped with the engineering research community’s latest tools for high-fidelity risk assessment and geospatial decision support. In the event of a hurricane or nor’easter, such capabilities are exceptionally vital to project storm impacts on critical infrastructure and other municipal assets and to inform preemptive actions that can save lives and mitigate property damage. In response, a web-based visualization environment was developed using the GeoNode content management system, informed by the needs of municipal stakeholders. Within this secure platform, registered users with roles in planning, emergency management and first response can simulate the impact of hurricanes and nor’easters using the platform’s storm Hazard Projection (SHP) Tool. The SHP Tool integrates fast-to-compute windfield models with surrogate models of high-fidelity storm surge and waves to rapidly simulate user-defined storm scenarios, considering the effects of tides, sea level rise, dune breaches and track uncertainty. In the case of a landfalling hurricane, SHP tool outputs are automatically loaded into the user’s dashboard to visualize the projected wind, storm surge and wave run-up based on the latest track information published by the National Hurricane Center. Under either use case, outputs of the SHP Tool are visualized within a robust collaborative geospatial environment supporting the seamless exploration of centralized libraries of geographic information system (GIS) data from federal, state, county and local authorities, with tools to add user-supplied annotations such as notes or other geospatial mark-ups. This paper will overview the development and deployment of this platform in the State of New Jersey, detailing the cyberinfrastructure design and underlying computational models, as well as the user stories that inspired the platform’s functionalities and interfaces. The study concludes with reflections from the process of piloting this project with stakeholders at the state and municipal level to support more risk-responsive and data-informed decision making.

An efficient approach for reviewing security-related aspects in agile requirements specifications of web applications

Defects in requirement specifications can have severe consequences during the software development life cycle. Some of them may result in poor product quality and/or time and budget overrun due to incorrect or missing quality characteristics, such as security. This characteristic requires special attention in web applications because they have become a target for manipulating sensible data. Several concerns make security difficult to deal with. For instance, security requirements are often misunderstood and improperly specified due to lack of security expertise and emphasis on security during early stages of software development. This often leads to unspecified or ill-defined security-related aspects. These concerns become even more challenging in agile contexts, where lightweight documentation is typically produced. To tackle this problem, we designed an approach for reviewing security-related aspects in agile requirements specifications of web applications. Our proposal considers user stories and security specifications as inputs and relates those user stories to security properties via natural language processing. Based on the related security properties, our approach identifies high-level security requirements from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) to be verified and generates a reading technique to support reviewers in detecting defects. We evaluate our approach via three experimental trials conducted with 56 novice software engineers, measuring effectiveness, efficiency, usefulness and ease of use. We compare our approach against using: (1) the OWASP high-level security requirements and (2) a perspective-based approach as proposed in contemporary state of the art. The results strengthen our confidence that using our approach has a positive impact (with large effect size) on the performance of inspectors in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Applying Machine Learning for Automatic User Story Categorization in Mobile Enterprises Application Development

<p dir="ltr"><span>Mobile enterprise applications (apps) are developed in dynamic and complex environments. Hardware characteristics, operating systems and development tools are constantly changing. In larger institutions, comprehensive corporate guidelines and requirements have to be followed. In addition, larger enterprises often develop numerous apps and lack an overview of development projects. Because of the size of such companies, a comprehensive direct information exchange between developers is often not practicable. In this situation, IT support is necessary, for example to prevent unnecessary duplication of work in the development of software artifacts such as user stories, app screen designs or code features within the company. One approach to overcome these challenges is to support reusing results from previous projects by building systems to organize and analyse the knowledge base of enterprise app development projects. For such systems an automatic categorization of artifacts is required. In this work we propose using a machine learning approach to categorize user stories. The approach is evaluated on a set of user stories from real-world mobile enterprise application development projects. The results are promising and suggest that machine learning approaches can be beneficially applied to user story classification in large companies.</span></p>

The patterns of user experience for sticky-note diagrams in software requirements workshops

Software requirements elicitation workshops often make use of a widely used and, on the surface, highly informal, notational medium: the sticky note. Often, in such workshops, facilitators and participants collaborate to construct “diagrams” made up of sticky notes. Methodologies have been developed that prescribe the way that diagram construction can uncover and document software requirements. Because they constitute a collaborative diagrammatic notation, such sticky-note diagrams lend themselves to an evaluation underpinned by theories of visual notation. In this paper we apply an analytic framework, the Patterns of User Experience (PUX), to sticky-note diagrams from two workshop methodologies, “Big Picture Event Storming” (BPES) by Alberto Brandolini and “User Story Mapping” (USM) by Jeff Patton. Our evaluation considers the sticky-note diagrams and the collaborative social processes surrounding them.

Theory-driven development of a medication adherence intervention delivered by eHealth and transplant team in allogeneic stem cell transplantation: the SMILe implementation science project

BackgroundMedication adherence to immunosuppressants in allogeneic stem cell transplantation (alloSCT) is essential to achieve favorable clinical outcomes (e.g. control of Graft-versus-Host Disease). Over 600 apps supporting medication adherence exist, yet they lack successful implementation and sustainable use likely because of lack of end-user involvement and theoretical underpinnings in their development and insufficient attention to implementation methods to support their use in real-life settings. Medication adherence has three phases: initiation, implementation and persistence. We report the theory-driven development of an intervention module to support medication adherence (implementation and persistence phase) in alloSCT outpatients as a first step for future digitization and implementation in clinical setting within the SMILe project (Development, implementation and testing of an integrated care model in allogeneicSteMcell transplantatIon faciLitated byeHealth).MethodsWe applied Michie’s Behavior Change Wheel (BCW) and the Capability-Opportunity-Motivation and Behavior (COM-B) model using three suggested stages followed by one stage added by our team regarding preparation for digitization of the intervention: (I) Defining the problem in behavioral terms; (II) Identifying intervention options; (III) Identifying content and implementation options; (IV) SMILe Care Model Prototype Development. Scientific evidence, data from a contextual analysis and patients’/caregivers’ and clinical experts’ inputs were compiled to work through these steps.Results(I) Correct immunosuppressant taking and timing were defined as target behaviors. The intervention’s focus was determined within the COM-B dimensions Capability (lack of knowledge, lack of routine), Opportunity (lack of cues, interruptions in daily routine) and Motivation (lack of problem solving, trivialization). (II) Five intervention functions were chosen, i.e. education, training, modelling, persuasion and enablement. (III) Twenty-four behavior change techniques were selected, e.g., goal setting, action planning and problem solving. (IV) Finally, seventeen user stories were developed to guide the SMILeApp’s software development process.ConclusionOur example on the theory-driven development of an intervention module in alloSCT delivered by eHealth and transplant team using a rigorous 3 + 1-stage approach based on BCW, COM-B and agile software development techniques, can be used as methodological guidance for other eHealth intervention developers. Our approach has the potential to enhance successful implementation and sustained use of eHealth solutions in real-life settings.

An Approach to Decompose and Evaluate a Complex GIS-Application Design to a Simple, Lightweight, User-Centered App-Based Design Using User Experience Evaluation

Working with contemporary, monolithic desktop Geographical Information Systems can be laborious and confusing, especially for non-experts. An alternative for a more user friendly approach to spatial data edition and spatial analysis may be an “app-based” web application that is offering single tasks for the user—“micro applications”. In this paper, a method for determining such “micro applications” based on user stories is presented and applied to a specific use case—the case is centered around an Austrian Governmental Institution that digitizes and edits infrastructure data. The results of this process are implemented in an app-based web application. To measure the impacts of the app-based approach, we evaluate the user experience of the app-based approach in comparison to a desktop Geographical Information System offering the same functionality. For the measurement of the user experience, we used a focus group. The group had to accomplish tasks with the desktop Geographical Information System and with the app-based web application. To measure their user experience, we employed the tool AttrakDiff. The app-based web application achieves significantly better results in terms of user experience. This result is confirmed in a discussion panel carried out afterwards. Test persons responded that positive aspects of the app-based web application were the easy and intuitive handling and reduced user interface that helps the users to focus on their tasks without any distraction.

Integrating UX work with agile development through user stories: An action research study in a small software company

The integration of user experience (UX) work with agile software development has been addressed in extensive research of challenges and process models. However, in-depth research of context-specific improvements of this integration with actual UX professionals and agile developers in their actual practice is limited. This study examines how the integration of UX work with agile development can be improved in the context of a small Danish Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We used the problem- and solution-oriented action research method over 12 months in the company. During this period, we initially carried out extensive participant observations, recorded 32 semi-structured interviews, and finally conducted two improvement iterations with evaluations of their effect on agility. We identified user stories as an essential indicator of UX integration. Verbose user stories imply problems in collaboration and trust, while concise user stories and deliberation improve integration of UX work with agile development. The conclusion is that integrating UX work with agile development in practice is complex, contextualized, and difficult even for only a small part of it. We propose that concise user stories and deliberation can be useful and well-defined focuses for integrating UX work with agile software development without sacrificing their agility.

Developing a Mobile App (iGAM) to Promote Gingival Health by Professional Monitoring of Dental Selfies: User-Centered Design Approach.

BackgroundDental visits are unpleasant; sometimes, patients only seek treatment when they are in intolerable pain. Recently, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the need for remote communication when patients and dentists cannot meet in person. Gingivitis is very common and characterized by red, swollen, bleeding gums. Gingivitis heals within 10 days of professional care and with daily, thorough oral hygiene practices. If left untreated, however, its progress may lead to teeth becoming mobile or lost. Of the many medical apps currently available, none monitor gingivitis.ObjectiveThis study aimed to present a characterization and development model of a mobile health (mHealth) app called iGAM, which focuses on periodontal health and improves the information flow between dentists and patients.MethodsA focus group discussed the potential of an app to monitor gingivitis, and 3 semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted on the use of apps for monitoring gum infections. We used a qualitative design process based on the Agile approach, which incorporated the following 5 steps: (1) user story, (2) use cases, (3) functional requirements, (4) nonfunctional requirements, and (5) Agile software development cycles. In a pilot study with 18 participants aged 18-45 years and with different levels of health literacy, participants were given a toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, toothpicks, and dental floss. After installing iGAM, they were asked to photograph their gums weekly for 4 weeks.ResultsAll participants in the focus group believed in the potential of a mobile app to monitor gingivitis and reduce its severity. Concerns about security and privacy issues were discussed. From the interviews, 2 themes were derived: (1) “what's in it for me?” and (2) the need for a take-home message. The 5 cycles of development highlighted the importance of communication between dentists, app developers, and the pilot group. Qualitative analysis of the data from the pilot study showed difficulty with: (1) the camera, which was alleviated with the provision of mouth openers, and (2) the operation of the phone, which was alleviated by changing the app to be fully automated, with a weekly reminder and an instructions document. Final interviews showed satisfaction.ConclusionsiGAM is the first mHealth app for monitoring gingivitis using self-photography. iGAM facilitates the information flow between dentists and patients between checkups and may be useful when face-to-face consultations are not possible (such as during the COVID-19 pandemic).