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Evaluating the usage of predefined interactive behaviors for writing user stories: an empirical study with potential product owners

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Abstract

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has gained popularity in agile software development as a means of specifying user requirements through user stories and scenarios for interactive systems under construction. Templates for guiding the writing of such stories are widely employed and can be helpful to ensure that consistent information about the requirements is provided. With the aim of getting preliminary results about how product owners (POs) write their own user stories under a predefined template, we conducted a case study with potential POs at the department in charge of business trips in a French research institute. The participants were invited to write their own user stories to describe a feature they are used to perform. The resultant stories have been analyzed to check their adherence to a template including common interactive behaviors defined by an ontology for interactive systems. Although the participants have followed different specification strategies, we observed an overall high level of adherence to the proposed template (62.26%). The results also pointed out to a wide use of domain-dependent behaviors, with the interactive behaviors defined by the ontology being, to some extent, reproduced by the participants even without prior training in the adopted vocabulary.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous participants of this study and the travel department of the Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research (IRIT) for authorizing the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICS-IRIT, Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

    Thiago Rocha Silva & Marco Winckler

  2. Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Thiago Rocha Silva

  3. SPARKS-i3S, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (Polytech), Sophia Antipolis, France

    Marco Winckler

  4. Human Design Group, HDG, Toulouse, France

    Cédric Bach

Authors
  1. Thiago Rocha Silva
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  2. Marco Winckler
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  3. Cédric Bach
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Correspondence to Thiago Rocha Silva.

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Rocha Silva, T., Winckler, M. & Bach, C. Evaluating the usage of predefined interactive behaviors for writing user stories: an empirical study with potential product owners. Cogn Tech Work 22, 437–457 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-019-00566-3

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