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On Modelers Ability to Build a Visual Diagram from a User Story Set: A Goal-Oriented Approach

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2018)

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] User Stories (US) are often used as requirement representation artifacts within agile projects. Within US sets, the nature, granularity and inter-dependencies of the elements constituting each US is not or poorly represented. To deal with these drawbacks, previous research allowed to build a unified model for tagging the elements of the WHO, WHAT and WHY dimensions of a US; each tag representing a concept with an inherent nature and defined granularity. Once tagged, the US elements can be graphically represented with an icon and the modeler can define the inter-dependencies between the elements to build one or more so-called Rationale Trees (RT). [Question/Problem] RT and their benefits have been illustrated on case studies but the ability to easily build a RT in a genuine case for software modelers not familiar with the concepts needs to be evaluated. [Principal ideas/results] This paper presents the result of a double exercise aimed to evaluate how well novice and experienced modelers were able to build a RT out of an existing US set. The experiment explicitly forces the test subjects to attribute a concept to US elements and to link these together. [Contribution] On the basis of the conducted experiment, we highlight the encountered difficulties that the lambda modeler faces when building a RT with basic support. Overall, the test subjects have produced models of satisfying quality. Also, we highlight these necessary conditions that need to be provided to the lambda modeler to build a consistent RT.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://goo.gl/8ZT5tD (this document is refereed to several times in the rest of this paper).

  2. 2.

    https://goo.gl/i8GmJM.

  3. 3.

    In the context of the statistical tests conducted in this work, a reliability of 95% has been used.

  4. 4.

    Both the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test as well as the Shapiro-Wilk test indicated that the variable of the global score was normally distributed.

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Correspondence to Yves Wautelet .

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Wautelet, Y., Velghe, M., Heng, S., Poelmans, S., Kolp, M. (2018). On Modelers Ability to Build a Visual Diagram from a User Story Set: A Goal-Oriented Approach. In: Kamsties, E., Horkoff, J., Dalpiaz, F. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10753. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_13

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