Evaluating the Usage of Predefined Interactive Behaviors for Writing User Stories: An Empirical Study with Potential Product Owners

Overview & Synopsis

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.