TY - GEN
T1 - On the impact of using different templates on creating and understanding user stories
AU - Gralha, Catarina
AU - Pereira, Rita
AU - Goulão, Miguel
AU - Araújo, João
N1 - Funding Information:
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/6817 - DCRRNI ID/UIDB%2F04516%2F2020/PT#
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Context: User stories are often used for elicitation and prioritisation of requirements. However, the lack of a widely adopted user story template, covering benefit and the usage (or not) of a persona, can affect user stories' quality, leading to ambiguity, lack of completeness, or accidental complexity. Objectives: Our goal was to analyse the differences between 4 alternative user story templates when creating and understanding user stories. Methods: We conducted a quasi-experiment. We asked 41 participants to perform creation and understanding tasks with the user story templates. We measured their accuracy, using metrics of task success; their speed, with task duration; visual effort, collected with an eye-tracker; and participants' perceived effort, evaluated with NASA-TLX. Results: Regarding the impact of the different templates in creating user stories, we observed statistically significant differences in some of the metrics for accuracy, speed and visual effort. For understanding user stories, we observed small differences in terms of visual effort. Conclusions: Although some templates outperformed others in a few metrics, no template obtained the best overall result. As such, we found no compelling evidence that one template is "better"than the others.
AB - Context: User stories are often used for elicitation and prioritisation of requirements. However, the lack of a widely adopted user story template, covering benefit and the usage (or not) of a persona, can affect user stories' quality, leading to ambiguity, lack of completeness, or accidental complexity. Objectives: Our goal was to analyse the differences between 4 alternative user story templates when creating and understanding user stories. Methods: We conducted a quasi-experiment. We asked 41 participants to perform creation and understanding tasks with the user story templates. We measured their accuracy, using metrics of task success; their speed, with task duration; visual effort, collected with an eye-tracker; and participants' perceived effort, evaluated with NASA-TLX. Results: Regarding the impact of the different templates in creating user stories, we observed statistically significant differences in some of the metrics for accuracy, speed and visual effort. For understanding user stories, we observed small differences in terms of visual effort. Conclusions: Although some templates outperformed others in a few metrics, no template obtained the best overall result. As such, we found no compelling evidence that one template is "better"than the others.
KW - Empirical evaluation
KW - Eye-tracking
KW - User story templates
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123217593&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/RE51729.2021.00026
DO - 10.1109/RE51729.2021.00026
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85123217593
SN - 978-1-6654-2857-6
T3 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
SP - 209
EP - 220
BT - Proceedings - 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2021
A2 - Moreira, Ana
A2 - Schneider, Kurt
A2 - Vierhauser, Michael
A2 - Cleland-Huang, Jane
PB - IEEE Computer Society Press
CY - Piscataway
T2 - 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2021
Y2 - 20 September 2021 through 24 September 2021
ER -