Speakers:
Fabiano Dalpiaz (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Sjaak Brinkkemper (Utrecht University, Netherlands)

90% of agile practitioners employ user stories for capturing requirements, also thanks to embedding of this practice within development tools. Among user story users, about 70% follow a simple template: As a role, I want to action, so that benefit. User stories’ popularity among practitioners and their simple yet strict structure make them ideal candidates for automatic reasoning based on natural language processing. In our research, we have found that about 50% of real-world user stories contain easily preventable linguistic defects. To alleviate this problem, we have created tool-supported methods that facilitate the creation of better user stories.
This tutorial combines previous work of the RE-Lab@UU into a pipeline for working with user stories: (1) The basics of creating user stories, and their use in requirements engineering; (2) How to improve user story quality with the Quality User Story Framework and AQUSA tool; (3) How to generate conceptual models from user stories using the Visual Narrator tool and analyze them for possible ambiguity and inconsistency; and (4) How to link requirements to architectures via the RE4SA model. Our approach is demonstrated with results obtained from 20+ software companies employing user stories. Index Terms—Agile requirements engineering, user stories, NLP, AQUSA, Visual Narrator, REVV-Light, RE4SA.