User Stories in Agile Software Development

Question:

Discuss about the Measuring Similarity in Business Process Models.

Agile software developments provides set of principles that can be adopted to develop a software by continuous improvements, adaptive planning and flexible to changes in user requirements managementq (Leau et al. 2012). The importance of agile methods is becoming more because of the flaws in the traditional methods of software development. In an agile method, user stories are considered to be the most used and important requirement model. Good user stories should be independent, valuable, negotiable, small, estimable as well as testable.

This report discusses about the role that the models of business process play in order to understand the user stories dependencies in a better manner. This report gives a brief overview of user story dependencies. It also discusses about how the user stories are integrated with the business process models. The research model and research methodologies that are used in the literature reviews are also discussed in this report. This report points out the findings and results regarding user the role of business process for better understanding of user dependencies. This report gives details about the issues and future works based on this report.

User story can be defined as a statement describing what the system is required to do for satisfying the needs of the user (Trkman, Mendling and Krisper 2016). A general template can be used for developing user story. The goal of this user story is to collect and store short notices regarding the functions that are desired for a system (Landhäußer and Genaid 2012). Software project domain can be understood in a correct way only by getting a proper insight into the dependencies between the user stories.  User stories can be speculated when previous domain knowledge is insufficient. The user stories cannot itself depict the order of execution as well as integration dependencies due to three characteristics that are mentioned as follows:

The functional names that are given to the user stories can be used for referring various abstraction levels.

Tacit as well as explicit knowledge sources can be used by the development team in order to gain information regarding dependencies that exist among various user stories. Product owner is the tacit knowledge source in Scrum. The product owner in this case has the responsibility for managing the requirements of the customer. The conceptual models on the other hand have the capability to capture knowledge that is explicit in nature. This helps in promoting the understanding regarding application domain as well as requirements. It also helps in promoting the understanding about the dependencies that exist between those requirements. There are several solutions that can be used for building a base for explicit knowledge. Use case diagrams and data flow diagrams can be used for this purpose. Story mapping approach can be used for understanding the user scenarios. Big stories can be sliced into small stories but the effectiveness of these techniques and proposals are missing on a large scale management.

Business Process Models

Business domains can be understood by business processes. Business process models are conceptual models that are widely used for the purpose of capturing the working of businesses and to understand how value creation takes place for various business stakeholders. Business process modeling plays a significant role in the decision making process of design and analysis of enterprise systems as well as workflow operations. BPMN is a standard notation that can be used for the purpose of modeling of business processes. According to Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016), one main agile principle states that advantages of the present documentation of the organization must be taken and therefore they have focused on exploiting the present business process models that are of higher level.

The methods of software development can be customized as per the needs of projects or organizations by an approach called method engineering. Existing methods can be adapted for carrying out a specific project by using an approach called situational method engineering. a method called process configuration is used where configuration of the new project can be done by extending base methods. Base methods consist of all instructions regarding handling of various projects. When a new project consists of specific characteristics that cannot be treated in a correct manner by the variations that are present in the base method then a new variation is entered or added. The name of the proposed method is BuPUS. This method has two components called base method and a method that is project specific. According to Jaqueira et al. (2013), the user stories can be viewed by business or i* models in a better, simpler and easier way. When user stories are mapped then the role in the user story is mapped to the actor in i* model, action in the user story is mapped to the task in i* model and the goal in the user story is mapped to the goal in i* model. According to Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016), base method is responsible for creating clauses of user stories. The user roles are also defined here. User story has two main components called user functionality and roles.  A business process has the ability to integrate information regarding the needs of the project and organization.

As stated by Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016), there are two factors that have a strong influence on the understanding of user stories dependencies. These two factors are association factor and representation factor of the application domain. Two materials are used for representing the application domain. One of them is BuPUS script and the other one is any of the three levels of granularity called level 1, 2 or 3 (Liskin et al. 2014). The association factor deals with the granularity level. There are two proposition presented. The first proposition is focused on understanding the dependencies of the execution order that exist among the user stories. The second proposition is focused on integrating the dependencies that exist among the user stories. There are three granularity levels called H1, H2 and H3 in proposition 1 and there are H4, H5 and H6 in proposition 2. According to Ziauddin and Zia (2012), story size is an estimation of work scale that depends on the effort of actual development. The user stories are given values based on the size of the user stories.  According to Jaqueira et al. (2013), visual models of business processes are helpful in understanding the needs of the users. The proposed solutions can be effectively understood by the stakeholders by using the business process models. The i* models represents the requirements in a graph so that the user stories can be visualized. This facilitates access to the requirements and improves the process of visualization thus improving the process of decision making.

Methods of Software Development

Empirical evaluations of the techniques of conceptual modeling are done by Wand’s framework. The user stories and BuPUS grammar are compared. The effectiveness of the products was measured using several tests like comprehension, recall and problem solving tests. The efficiency of the products was also assessed by using questions in order to measure the usefulness that is perceived. Various pilot experiments were conducted for testing the performance of subject. The pilot phase made use of questionnaire that could be completed within 50 minutes. Two workbooks had been created. The first workbook consisted of the business process models that are associated with the stories of the user. The second workbook consisted of a list of stories of the users that are available. The data that had been collected from the unguided and guided treatments were treated in an independent manner. Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016) conducted an experiment were they had considered 127 under graduate students as their subject.  These students belonged to one of the seven classes in the Vienna University. Students who were aware of the business process modeling found it very simple to understand the concept of user stories (Van Dongen, Dijkman and Mendling 2013). This experiment did not require experts in agile development or BPMN models. These students were given knowledge about INVEST qualities. They were also asked questions regarding gender, age, nationality and knowledge regarding English language.  There were 41 females and 85 males. The problem solving test included two questions where one focused on understanding of execution order and the other on integration dependencies.  A topic of account management was selected that included 24 number of business process models. Two models were selected.  Mahnic (2012) designed a course for teaching Scrum in the real world by augmenting Scrum methods with the user stories. Comparison between actual and estimated effort is found out by Mahnic (2012). Cost estimation techniques were used (Ziauddin and Zia 2012).  This paper gave an overview of development of agile software.  They determined the effort and agile velocity.

Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016) provided support for the six hypotheses. The first three hypotheses focused on the dependencies of the execution order. It was found out that the business process models along with the user stories were able to improve the understanding level of the dependencies of the execution order. It was also found out that the size of the effect is large. It was demonstrated that the element of sequence flow that were used in the business process models had offered valuable or sensitive information. The last three hypotheses were aimed to understand the dependencies of integration that existed among the user stories. A statistic report supported that the results had various size of effects. This research helped to contribute in software engineering. The agile principle suggested reusing the existing documents.    

Visual Models of Business Processes

According to Trkman, Mendling and Krisper (2016), one major problem that is addressed is regarding the management of user stories of the projects. The problem arises when the context of a user story is missing. This problem could be solved by reusing present business process model for getting information about dependencies. There can be issues when the role of a Scrum master is combined with that of a product owner (Mahnic 2012). According to Jaqueira et al. (2013), the main issues were limitation of software context as well as dependencies of the stories. One of the major challenges is the limited documentation present in agile development.

Advanced tools can be developed for the purpose of transforming the user stories. Researchers are planning to develop a tool for automating the mapping process of user stories for the i* model (Jaqueira et al. 2013).  Researchers are also trying to identify as well as treat the connections and relationships between tasks. The guidelines are also being developed for performing mapping from i* model to the users stories. The future iterations are trying to be made more realistic by scrum.

Conclusion

This report concluded that business process models can be used for understanding the user stories in a better manner. This report gave an overview of user stories dependencies. It said that user story can be defined as a statement describing what the system is required to do for satisfying the needs of the user. This report explained about the integration between business process models and user stories. It said that business process models are conceptual models that are widely used for the purpose of capturing the working of businesses and to understand how value creation takes place for various business stakeholders. It pointed out that base method is responsible for creating clauses of user stories. The user roles were also defined here. User story has two main components called user functionality and roles. This report discussed about the research methods and said that the user stories and BuPUS grammar were compared. It found out that the effectiveness of the products was measured using several tests like comprehension, recall and problem solving tests. This report also provided support for the six hypotheses. The first three hypotheses focused on the dependencies of the execution order. It was found out that the business process models along with the user stories were able to improve the understanding level of the dependencies of the execution order. The problems and the future related works have also been discussed in this report.

References

Jaqueira, A., Lucena, M., Alencar, F.M., Castro, J. and Aranha, E., 2013. Using i* Models to Enrich User Stories. iStar, 13, pp.55-60.

Mahnic, V., 2012. A capstone course on agile software development using Scrum. IEEE Transactions on Education, 55(1), pp.99-106.

Trkman, M., Mendling, J. and Krisper, M., 2016. Using business process models to better understand the dependencies among user stories. Information and Software Technology, 71, pp.58-76.

Van Dongen, B., Dijkman, R. and Mendling, J., 2013. Measuring similarity between business process models. In Seminal Contributions to Information Systems Engineering (pp. 405-419). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Ziauddin, S.K.T. and Zia, S., 2012. An effort estimation model for agile software development. Advances in computer science and its applications (ACSA), 314, pp.314-324.

Leau, Y.B., Loo, W.K., Tham, W.Y. and Tan, S.F., 2012. Software development life cycle AGILE vs traditional approaches. In International Conference on Information and Network Technology(Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 162-167).

Landhäußer, M. and Genaid, A., 2012, June. Connecting user stories and code for test development. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (pp. 33-37). IEEE Press.

Liskin, O., Pham, R., Kiesling, S. and Schneider, K., 2014, May. Why we need a granularity concept for user stories. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 110-125). Springer, Cham.