Embedding stakeholder values in the requirements engineering process

Abstract

Software has become an integral part of our daily lives and should therefore account for human values such as trust, autonomy and privacy. Human values have received increased attention in the field of Requirements Engineering over the last few years, but existing work offers no systematic way to use elicited values in requirements engineering and evaluation processes. In earlier work we proposed the Value Story workshop, a domain-independent method that connects value elicitation techniques from the field of Human-Computer Interaction to the identification of user stories, a common requirements specification format in Requirements Engineering. This paper studies whether user stories obtained in a Value Story workshop 1) adequately account for values, and 2) are usable by developers. The results of an empirical evaluation show that values are significantly better incorporated in user stories obtained in a Value Story workshop than through user stories obtained in regular requirements elicitation workshops. The results also show that value-based user stories are deemed valuable to the end-user, but rated less well on their size, estimableness and testability. This paper concludes that the Value Story workshop is a promising method for embedding values in the Requirements Engineering process, but that value-based user stories need to be translated to use cases to make them suitable for planning and organizing implementation activities.