Unifying and extending user story models

Abstract

Within Agile methods, User Stories (US) are mostly used as primary requirements artifacts and units of functionality of the project. The idea is to express requirements on a low abstraction basis using natural language. Most of them are exclusively centered on the final user as only stakeholder. Over the years, some templates (in the form of concepts relating the WHO, WHAT and WHY dimensions into a phrase) have been proposed by agile methods practitioners or academics to guide requirements gathering. Using these templates can be problematic. Indeed, none of them define any semantic related to a particular syntax precisely or formally leading to various possible interpretations of the concepts. Consequently, these templates are used in an ad-hoc manner, each modeler having idiosyncratic preferences. This can nevertheless lead to an underuse of representation mechanisms, misunderstanding of a concept use and poor communication between stakeholders. This paper studies templates found in literature in order to reach unification in the concepts' syntax, an agreement in their semantics as well as methodological elements increasing inherent scalability of US-based projects. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.