User Stories Research Articles

Development and Effectiveness of a Mobile Health Intervention in Improving Health Literacy and Self-management of Patients With Multimorbidity and Heart Failure: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundPatients with multimorbidity and complex health needs are defined as a priority by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union. There is a need to develop appropriate strategies with effective measures to meet the challenge of chronicity, reorienting national health systems. The increasing expansion of mobile health (mHealth) interventions in patient communication, the reduction of health inequalities, improved access to health care resources, adherence to treatment, and self-care of chronic diseases all point to an optimistic outlook. However, only few mobile apps demonstrate their effectiveness in these patients, which is diminished when they are not based on evidence, or when they are not designed by and for users with different levels of health literacy (HL).ObjectiveThis study aims to evaluate the efficacy of an mHealth intervention relative to routine clinical practice in improving HL and self-management in patients with multimorbidity with heart failure (HF) and complex health needs.MethodsThis is a randomized, multicenter, blinded clinical trial evaluating 2 groups, namely, a control group (standard clinical practice) and an intervention group (standard clinical practice and an ad hoc designed mHealth intervention previously developed), for 12 months.ResultsThe contents of the mHealth intervention will address user-perceived needs based on the development of user stories regarding diet, physical exercise, cardiac rehabilitation, therapeutic adherence, warning signs and symptoms, and emotional management. These contents have been validated by expert consensus. The creation and development of the contents of the mHealth intervention (app) took 18 months and was completed during 2021. The mobile app is expected to be developed by the end of 2022, after which it will be applied to the experimental group as an adjunct to standard clinical care during 12 months.ConclusionsThe trial will demonstrate whether the mobile app improves HL and self-management in patients with HF and complex health needs, improves therapeutic adherence, and reduces hospital admissions. This study can serve as a starting point for developing other mHealth tools in other pathologies and for their generalization to other contexts.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04725526; https://tinyurl.com/bd8va27wInternational Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/35945

A SWOT Analysis of Software Requirement Validation Techniques

Existing software requirement validation (SRV) techniques are theoretical concepts with no real-life application. No report on what could be considered as the best of the SRV techniques. Our study focus on systematic literature review of existing SRV techniques, emphasizing on their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) as well as the involvement of end-users in SRV process. We opined to identify SRV technique(s) that could be considered best and user-centric. Four hundred and twenty-four articles were identified initially but after applying the exclusion criteria, 59 articles were identified for review. We defined one generic research question (GRQ) and five specific research questions (SRQi, i = 1,2,3,4,5) to guide our review and provide the required details for SWOT analysis of SRV techniques. A software is yet to be developed for users’ requirements validation both on a small and larg scale and none of the SRV techniques incorporate user story framework.

Enhancing agile process with open unified process framework (OUPF)

The awareness and practice of the agile process has increased very much in recent years. Yet, there are gaps among the developers in agile adoption. A backup support from conventional process standards can enhance the outcome of agile work. Choosing Open Unified Process framework (OUPF) as process repository, a semantic model is proposed to link an agile software project with standard process components and guidelines. Any agile software project can be instantiated in terms of requirements (as user stories) and tasks using this semantic model, drawing guidance from OUPF. This semantic model is applied on a real time project in an industrial environment. The results show that there is an improvement in project outcome when agile is combined with Open Unified Process Framework.

System Analysis to UML – Restaurant Case Study

The paper presents a detailed examination of the application of Unified Modeling Language (UML) for system analysis within the context of a restaurant business case study. It begins with the articulation of business requirements through user journey understanding and user story definition. The importance of a good user story is emphasized, with a particular focus on the INVEST characteristics that ensure a user story's effectiveness. The paper further delves into the basics of UML, exploring fundamental concepts such as classes, and the various relationships within class structures including association, aggregation, and composition. Additionally, it discusses the significance of polymorphism and interface design in object-oriented programming. The paper also highlights Object-oriented design (OOD) heuristics, which provide developers with a set of guidelines for making informed design decisions. A comprehensive user story, constructed from the restaurant use case, demonstrates the practical application of these concepts. This is followed by the development of corresponding UML diagrams, including a use case diagram, an activity diagram, and a state diagram, which collectively showcase the robust modeling capabilities of UML in capturing complex system requirements and providing a clear pathway for system design and implementation.

An impact-driven approach to predict user stories instability

An impact-driven approach to predict user stories instability

Towards digitalization of requirements: generating context-sensitive user stories from diverse specifications

Towards digitalization of requirements: generating context-sensitive user stories from diverse specifications

Empirical research on requirements quality: a systematic mapping study

Research has repeatedly shown that high-quality requirements are essential for the success of development projects. While the term “quality” is pervasive in the field of requirements engineering and while the body of research on requirements quality is large, there is no meta-study of the field that overviews and compares the concrete quality attributes addressed by the community. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic mapping study of the scientific literature. We retrieved 6905 articles from six academic databases, which we filtered down to 105 relevant primary studies. The primary studies use empirical research to explicitly define, improve, or evaluate requirements quality. We found that empirical research on requirements quality focuses on improvement techniques, with very few primary studies addressing evidence-based definitions and evaluations of quality attributes. Among the 12 quality attributes identified, the most prominent in the field are ambiguity, completeness, consistency, and correctness. We identified 111 sub-types of quality attributes such as “template conformance” for consistency or “passive voice” for ambiguity. Ambiguity has the largest share of these sub-types. The artefacts being studied are mostly referred to in the broadest sense as “requirements”, while little research targets quality attributes in specific types of requirements such as use cases or user stories. Our findings highlight the need to conduct more empirically grounded research defining requirements quality, using more varied research methods, and addressing a more diverse set of requirements types.

Data-driven effort estimation techniques of agile user stories: a systematic literature review

Data-driven effort estimation techniques of agile user stories: a systematic literature review

User Story Extraction from Online News with FeatureBased and Maximum Entropy Method for Software Requirements Elicitation

Software requirements query is the frst stage in software requirements engineering. Elicitation is the process of identifying software requirements from various sources such as interviews with resource persons, questionnaires, document analysis, etc. The user story is easy to adapt according to changing system requirements. The user story is a semi-structured language because the compilation of user stories must follow the syntax as a standard for writing features in agile software development methods. In addition, user story also easily understood by end-users who do not have an information technology background because they contain descriptions of system requirements in natural language. In making user stories, there are three aspects, namely the who aspect (actor), what aspect (activity), and the why aspect (reason). This study proposes the extraction of user stories consisting of who and what aspects of online news sites using feature extraction and maximum entropy as a classifcation method. The systems analyst can use the actual information related to the lessons obtained in the online news to get the required software requirements. The expected result of the extraction method in this research is to produce user stories relevant to the software requirements to assist systems analysts in generating requirements. This proposed method shows that the average precision and recall are 98.21% and 95.16% for the who aspect; 87,14% and 87,50% for what aspects; 81.21% and 78.60% for user stories. Thus, this result suggests that the proposed method generates user stories relevant to functional software.

An Agile Software Engineering Method to Design Blockchain Applications

Cryptocurrencies and its underlying technology, Blockchain, are transforming banking and economics by allowing trustworthy programs to exist without the requirement for a trusted counterpart. In recent years, the Blockchain and the programs that run on it, known as Smart Contracts, have seen increased use across all businesses that demand trust and verifiable credentials. Some have compared the "Blockchain revolution" to the early days of the Internet and the World Wide Web. As a result, all Blockchain-based software development is accelerating at a dizzying pace. Many software engineers argue that the widespread interest in Blockchain technology has resulted in haphazard and rushed software creation, a type of first-come, first-served competition that fails to assure software quality or take into consideration core software engineering ideas. This research tries to solve this issue by proposing a software development strategy for gathering requirements, assessing them, designing, creating, testing, and deploying Blockchain applications. Several Agile approaches are employed in the process, including User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. It does, however, employ more formal notations, such as UML diagrams that define the system's design, with improvements to express unique Blockchain concepts. The method is well discussed, including an example to illustrate how it works.

Systematic Literature Mapping of User Story Research

User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. To our knowledge, a systematic mapping of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">all</i> user story research has not been performed. To this end, we study the academic literature to investigate what user stories research has been performed, what types of problems have been identified, what sort of solutions or other types of research outcomes have been achieved, how mature the research is, and what research gaps exist. We followed Systematic Mapping Study guidelines to synthesize the currently available academic research on user stories. In total, we found 186 unique peer-reviewed studies, published in the period 2001-2021. We observed that research on the user story technique and its use had grown exponentially over the last seven years. Further, using a five-dimensional classification framework– requirements engineering activity, problem class, outcome class, type of research, type of publication– we observed several patterns in the classification of these studies across the different framework dimensions, which provided insights into the state-of-the-art and maturity of the research. We also identified four research gaps: the paucity of focused literature reviews; a lack of research on the role that user stories play in human cognition and interaction; a lack of comprehensive and mature solutions for resolving ambiguity issues with user stories early in the project; and a lack of validation and evaluation of proposed solutions. Several research opportunities are suggested, making our paper a useful reference for future research on user stories allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions.

Synergistically Employing User Stories and Use Cases in the Practice and Teaching of Systems Analysis and Design

Over the past three decades, user stories and use cases have become increasingly dominant systems analysis and design (SA&amp;D) requirements techniques. Both support articulating functional requirements for software projects, although they evolved within different software development approaches—user stories from agile development and use cases from traditional software engineering—and they differ significantly in terms of their grammar, syntax, and the level of detail they can capture. As such, user stories and use cases are neither synonyms nor mutually exclusive alternatives. Rather, they can and should be complementary in the systems requirements process. Unfortunately, this mix of similarities and differences—coupled with a lack of formal standards for either—make understanding and synergistically employing user stories with use cases confusing and challenging for practitioners and students alike. To address this, this paper first provides a descriptive overview of the evolution of user stories, use cases, and their interrelationship. Second, it fills a gap in the literature by providing a prescriptive, detailed approach to employing user stories and use cases together. This prescriptive approach is illustrated via a comprehensive tutorial example, providing practitioners with actionable skills and SA&amp;D teachers and students with a new pedagogical tool.

Using Conceptual Models in Agile Software Development: A Possible Solution to Requirements Engineering Challenges in Agile Projects

Studies on requirements engineering with Agile methods for software development have shown difficulties in managing the quality of the requirements and communicating with users. Some of these studies have proposed conceptual modeling as a solution to these problems. However, the effort that is required to create conceptual models conflicts with Agile values. In this paper, we propose an approach for using conceptual models in projects while adhering to Agile principles. This approach focuses on projects in which requirements are expressed as user stories that are the main artifacts of the requirements used for software development with Agile methods. First, the paper presents a literature review in which we have systematically searched for the challenges to requirements engineering with Agile methods. Next, we report on a survey study in which we interviewed 16 experts in the Agile methodology to confirm the identified challenges and find new ones that are not covered in the literature. Based on a thematic analysis of the challenges, we argue that most of them map to the two main purposes of using conceptual models in software development: improving communication and understanding requirements. To effectively use conceptual models in projects that use the Agile methodology, several conditions must be met, which we make explicit in the paper. The paper ends by illustrating how these conditions can be met demonstrating the models that can be automatically generated from a given set of user stories. This demonstration was subsequently used to obtain feedback from the experts on the perceived benefits of conceptual models in addressing the challenges of requirements engineering.

How Can Human Values Be Addressed in AgileMethods A Case Study on SAFe

Agile methods are predominantly focused on delivering business values. But can Agile methods be adapted to effectively address and deliver human values such as social justice, privacy, and sustainability in the software they produce Human values are what an individual or a society considers important in life. Ignoring these human values in software can pose difficulties or risks for all stakeholders (e.g., user dissatisfaction, reputation damage, financial loss). To answer this question, we selected the Scaled AgileFramework (SAFe), one of the most commonly used Agile methods in the industry, and conducted a qualitative case study to identify possible intervention points within SAFe that are the most natural to address and integrate human values in software. We present five high-level empirically-justified sets of interventions in SAFe: artefacts, roles, ceremonies, practices, and culture. We elaborate how some currentAgile artefacts (e.g., user story), roles (e.g., product owner), ceremonies (e.g., stand-up meeting), and practices (e.g., business-facing testing) in SAFe can be modified to support the inclusion of human values in software. Further, our study suggests new and exclusive values-based artefacts (e.g., legislative requirement), ceremonies (e.g., values conversation), roles (e.g., values champion), and cultural practices (e.g., induction and hiring) to be introduced in SAFe for this purpose. Guided by our findings, we argue that existingAgile methods can account for human values in software delivery with some evolutionary adaptations.

Requirements Elicitation in ERP Implementation Process

Management software has gained an increasing preponderance over the years. Following that increased demand, as ERPs evolve and diversify, the characteristics and the correspondent needs of companies adopting them expanded significantly. To fulfill these needs, consulting companies in charge of implementing the ERP applications, resource to complex implementation processes. The value that consultants add to this implementation process comes from their experience and knowledge not only of the area of intervention and the specific characteristics of the software, but also from their experience in previous implementations in other projects. It is in this context, that transfer of knowledge between projects and consultants gains an increased importance.Due to its ability to model all possible products of a software product line in a given context, Feature Model concept has been used in the ERP domain with the objective of reducing time and costs in ERP projects by mapping requirements to correspondent past configurations and customizations.Using feature model and user stories methods, this work analyzes the development and implementation of a suggested ERP configuration methodology in a consulting company, aiming to improve the transfer of knowledge within projects and consultants. Following design research methods, the methodology developed was tested through an ERP implementation project.Findings of this work include an easier traceability between requirements and features, reutilization of configurations between projects and improved uniformization regarding requirements elicitation process.

User Story Extraction from Natural Language for Requirements Elicitation: Identify Software-Related Information from Online News

User Story Extraction from Natural Language for Requirements Elicitation: Identify Software-Related Information from Online News

UX Poker: Estimating the Influence of User Stories on User Experience in Early Stage of Agile Development

UX Poker: Estimating the Influence of User Stories on User Experience in Early Stage of Agile Development

An Agent-Based Framework for Developing Multiple Conceptual Models from Extended User Stories

An Agent-Based Framework for Developing Multiple Conceptual Models from Extended User Stories

Anatomy of a Data Science Software Toolkit That Uses Machine Learning to Aid ‘Bench-to-Bedside’ Medical Research—With Essential Concepts of Data Mining and Analysis Explained

Data science and machine learning are buzzwords of the early 21st century. Now pervasive through human civilization, how do these concepts translate to use by researchers and clinicians in the life-science and medical field? Here, we describe a software toolkit, just large enough in scale, so that it can be maintained and extended by a small team, optimised for problems that arise in small/medium laboratories. In particular, this system may be managed from data ingestion statistics preparation predictions by a single person. At the system’s core is a graph type database, so that it is flexible in terms of irregular, constantly changing data types, as such data types are common during explorative research. At the system’s outermost shell, the concept of ’user stories’ is introduced to help the end-user researchers perform various tasks separated by their expertise: these range from simple data input, data curation, statistics, and finally to predictions via machine learning algorithms. We compiled a sizable list of already existing, modular Python platform libraries usable for data analysis that may be used as a reference in the field and may be incorporated into this software. We also provide an insight into basic concepts, such as labelled-unlabelled data, supervised vs. unsupervised learning, regression vs. classification, evaluation by different error metrics, and an advanced concept of cross-validation. Finally, we show some examples from our laboratory using our blood sample and blood clot data from thrombosis patients (sufferers from stroke, heart and peripheral thrombosis disease) and how such tools can help to set up realistic expectations and show caveats.

Information security policy compliance-eliciting requirements for a computerized software to support value-based compliance analysis

When end users have to prioritize between different rationalities in organisations there is a risk of non-compliance with information security policies. Thus, in order for information security managers to align information security with the organisations’ core work practices, they need to understand the competing rationalities. The Value-based compliance (VBC) analysis method has been suggested to this end, however it has proven to be complex and time-consuming. Computerized software may aid this type of analysis and make it more efficient and executable. The purpose of this paper is to elicit a set of requirements for computerized software that support analysis of competing rationalities in relation to end users’ compliance and non-compliance with information security policies. We employed a design science research approach, drawing on design knowledge on VBC and elicited 17 user stories. These requirements can direct future research efforts to develop computerized software in this area.