A Framework To Improve User Story Sets Through Collaboration

Abstract: Agile methodologies have become increasingly popular in recent years. Due to its inherent nature, agile methodologies involve stakeholders with a wide range of expertise and require interaction between them, relying on collaboration and customer involvement. Hence, agile methodologies encourage collaboration between all team members so that more efficient and effective processes are maintained. Generating requirements can be challenging, as it requires the participation of multiple stakeholders who describe various aspects of the project and possess a shared understanding of essential concepts. One simple method for capturing requirements using natural language is through user stories, which document the agreed-upon properties of a project. Stakeholders try to strive for completeness while generating user stories, but the final user story set may still be flawed. To address this issue, we propose SCOUT: Supporting Completeness of User Story Sets, which employs a natural language processing pipeline to extract key concepts from user stories and construct a knowledge graph by connecting related terms. The knowledge graph and different heuristics are then utilized to enhance the quality and completeness of the user story sets by generating suggestions for the stakeholders. We perform a user study to evaluate SCOUT and demonstrate its performance in constructing user stories. The quantitative and qualitative results indicate that SCOUT significantly enhance the quality and completeness of the user story sets. Our contribution is threefold. First, we develop heuristics to suggest new concepts to include in user stories by considering both the individuals' and other team members' contributions. Second, we implement an open-source collaborative tool to support writing user stories and ensuring their quality. Third, we share the experimental setup and materials.