Navigational Distances between UX Information and User Stories in

Agile Virtual Environments

Abner Cleto Filho

and Luciana A. M. Zaina

Federal University of S

ao Carlos, Sorocaba, S

ao Paulo, Brazil

Keywords:

Agile Practice, User eXperience, User Story, Navigational Distance.

Abstract:

User stories (US) are valuable artifacts to agile teams, being a succinct requirement description with its details

complemented by other artifacts. User eXperience (UX) is an important cross-cutting quality requirement

that has gained spotlight over the past years. Many approaches on merging agile and UX are presented in the

literature, but few have analysed how UX information and US are related in agile virtual environments. This

paper presents a case study which investigates the navigational distances between UX information and USs.

The goal was to understand how agile practitioners linked UX information to USs. To do this, we conducted

a qualitative analysis in 13 requirement documents of three different industry projects and also we explored

the USs derived from such documents. We propose a classiﬁcation of navigational distances found among UX

information and USs, discussing the pros and cons of each distance type. Our work contributes to motivate

agile teams in rethinking about different forms to organize the information, artifacts and documents in virtual

environments.

1 INTRODUCTION

Studies on agile and User eXperience (UX) prac-

tices are not new in the literature (Brhel et al., 2015;

Da Silva et al., 2011; Sch

on et al., 2017). Issues

about the integration of these two areas have changed

through time. A recent study by Da Silva et al.

(2018) concluded that agile and UX are getting closer

over time, and the tendency is that both merge into

a single practice. The same study still reinforces the

differences among UX and agile, reporting context-

dependency issues, where different teams use a diver-

sity of artifacts and techniques to create shared under-

standing.

UX and agile practices are often seen from differ-

ent lenses. Agile aims to have small pieces of work

delivered to clients in a fast paced manner, receiving

feedback constantly (Brhel et al., 2015; Trienekens

et al., 2018). On the other hand, UX aims to work

with the users emotions and perceptions on the prod-

uct it is using (Garrett, 2010), being it main focus to

enrich the quality of the product, working with non-

functional aspects and to create a holistic view about

the product usage (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, 2006).

These different ways of working introduce challenges

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7804-0171

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1736-544X

regarding on how agile teams manage the relationship

of agile and UX documentations.

A diversity of virtual and physical tools have

arisen to support team-work. Virtual environments

(e.g. Jira

) are widely employed for managing the

diversity and the great amount of information that is

created by agile teams (Akman et al., 2015). User

Story (US) is recognized as the most valuable artifact

to agile teams (Cohn, 2004). Its value comes from it

gives details about software features as well as sup-

ports individuals in managing the team tasks (Sch

et al., 2017). Although commonly used, it is known

that USs may not contain all the information an agile

team needs for the software development (Hess et al.,

2017; Kashﬁ et al., 2017). Agile teams often use other

documents and artifacts to complement the informa-

tion found in USs (Garcia et al., 2019).

Moreover, agile practitioners have struggled on

how to organize the great amount of artifacts that sup-

port their work (Hess et al., 2017). The lack of linking

among relevant artifacts and information, as well as

the excessive number of steps to reach the informa-

tion, can introduce problems regarding the distance

between the artifacts and information.

The literature has reported ﬁndings about ag-

ile documentation issues and agile-UX integration.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Filho, A. and Zaina, L.

Navigational Distances between UX Information and User Stories in Agile Virtual Environments.

DOI: 10.5220/0009354801850192

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2020) - Volume 2, pages 185-192

ISBN: 978-989-758-423-7

185

However, little is known on how UX information are

linked to USs in virtual environments, which are of-

ten used by agile practitioners. With the aim of inves-

tigating this issue, we deﬁned the following research

questions (RQs): RQ1 - How are UX information and

USs connected into software virtual environments?,

and RQ2 - What are the navigational distances found

to access UX information from USs into software vir-

tual environments?.

To answer the RQs, we conducted a case study in

a software development company based in Brazil. In

our study, ﬁrst, 13 requirement documents of 3 dif-

ferent projects were analyzed to uncover how the UX

information was connected to USs. After, we exam-

ined the USs produced from such documents and its

relationship with other artifacts. We performed all the

investigation considering that USs, requirement doc-

uments and artifacts related to them were stored in

virtual environments.

Our ﬁndings revealed that UX information was

spread in different artifacts and in a diversity of ways.

Consequently, this dispersion could introduce a prob-

lem of navigational distance. As contribution our

work presents a categorization of different forms of

navigational distance that can be found between US

and other artifacts.Our results may support other ag-

ile teams in the understanding on how the UX infor-

mation often is distributed around the virtual environ-

ments and how to better organize it. We also provide

some recommendation of how agile teams can avoid

facing issues caused by navigational distances.

2 FUNDAMENTALS AND

RELATED WORK

2.1 Fundamentals

Garrett’s framework (Garrett, 2010), named The ele-

ments of UX (Figure 1), helped us to deﬁne what kind

of UX information we were looking for in the doc-

uments and USs. It is a framework containing ﬁve

planes describing elements of UX. The planes can be

summarized as following.

The strategy plane aligns users needs with the

product’s objective. The scope plane, deﬁnes the

functional speciﬁcation of the product. Next, the

structure plane, deals with how the system behaves

in a user interaction (i.e. interaction design) and the

arrangement of content elements (i.e information ar-

chitecture). In a further reﬁnement of the structure,

the skeleton plane deals with concrete elements such

as buttons, ﬁelds, menus (interface design), content

representation (information design) and with the in-

teraction over user interface (navigation design). Fi-

nally, in the surface plane, the aesthetics elements are

considered to produce a pleasing interface and fulﬁlls

the goals of the other planes. In each plane, Garrett

suggests some UX artifacts that could be used to sup-

port developers in working on each element of UX.

Figure 1: The Elements of UX - Adapted from (Garrett,

2010).

To explore the requirement documents and USs we

adopted the coding technique, a qualitative technique

that relates codes to chunks of text. These codes re-

ceive denominations that give meaning to the chunks

of texts they refer to (Bohm, 2004). Later, these cod-

iﬁcations are revisited and grouped when patterns of

information are identiﬁed. For this analysis, we per-

formed three rounds of coding using closed coding

and open coding approaches.

In the closed coding the researcher searches for

chunks of text that match with some concepts that the

researcher previously have. In our case, we used Gar-

rett’s Framework as our concepts (Garrett, 2010). We

also adopted the open coding approach. In this case,

no pre-conception about data labelling is used. The

researcher created new codes that bring meaning to

the chunk of text. Considering the exploration of the

text, ﬁrst we examined each word or line and coded it.

After, larger pieces or blocks of text are explored, and

new codes emerged from this analysis (Bohm, 2004).

As our main goal was to investigate the linking be-

tween US and UX information, our study was based

on the theory of distances (Bjarnason and Sharp,

2017), which aims to categorize the difference of po-

sition or level among the stakeholders or artifacts in-

volved into the development of software projects. The

distances are related to the effort required to accom-

plish the tasks that constitute the development of the

system. They are classiﬁed into eight sub-categories,

being one of them the navigational distance.

Navigational distance describes how distant ar-

tifacts are regarding their positions (Bjarnason and

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186

Sharp, 2017). In a virtual tool, as Jira, such distance

can be taken as the length of the path to navigate be-

tween the artifacts, being the length calculated by the

number of links that the individuals have to access to

reach the information (Bjarnason and Sharp, 2017).

2.2 Related Work

Kashﬁ et al. investigated the challenges software

practitioners face on dealing with UX in software de-

velopment (Kashﬁ et al., 2017). Among the different

challenges, the authors identiﬁed the need for mech-

anisms that improve the traceability between UX-

related and other requirements. Schon et al. carried

out a survey and presented the key challenges in ag-

ile requirements engineering. One key challenge re-

ported was how to manage the diversity of documen-

tation that support agile teams in their work (Sch

et al., 2017). Liskin conducted interviews with soft-

ware practitioners and as a result the author classi-

ﬁes the artifacts into different groups according to the

artifacts role in a project. The ﬁndings showed that

projects need to make usage of a whole variety of dif-

ferent artifacts, which carries the risk of inconsisten-

cies or inefﬁciencies emerging from the dependencies

between multiple artifacts (Liskin, 2015).

Kassab, from a survey that compares agile with

waterfall requirements engineering, points that Jira is

the most used tool to support agile practices (Kassab,

2014). Hess and Seyff report that agile approaches

have a strong focus on face-to-face communication

instead of having detailed Requirement Engineering

(RE) documentation (Hess et al., 2017). This empha-

sizes its early analysis, which showed that artifacts

used in agile activities cover key requirements infor-

mation, but its has a lower detail level if compared

with traditional RE artifacts. The authors statement

is based on the results they got from interviews and a

survey with agile team members.

Considering that US is the most popular artifact

used by agile practitioners (Sch

on et al., 2017), many

works have proposed ways of how to write USs. In

2009, Cohn proposed a grammar as a pattern to the

writing of user story which is currently used by agile

teams (Cohn, 2004). Shortly, the grammar contains

elements to picture out the users, their goals, and rea-

sons to do something in the system. Choma, Zaina

and Beraldo extended Cohn’s proposal, creating the

UserX story, from which agile practitioners can add

UX information in the US body (Choma et al., 2016).

The authors concluded that agile practitioners have

difﬁculties in understanding how a single US can hold

all the UX information they need.

In a literature mapping about agile and UX prac-

tices, Garcia et al. concluded that virtual artifacts are

mostly used as basis for development phases in agile

practices (Garcia et al., 2017). The authors also re-

ported that mock-ups and USs are often used in com-

bination to support the agile developers work. Such

conclusion is also supported by Garcia et al. (2019),

which carried an investigation in an online agile com-

munity, also concluding that mock-ups are adopted in

combination with USs (Garcia et al., 2019). However,

the studies above do not cover how the UX informa-

tion outside the US can still be linked to it.

3 CASE STUDY SETTINGS

The case study was conducted in a software global or-

ganization of ﬁnancial domain. It is present in twelve

countries, having more then ﬁve thousand employ-

ees. The study concentrated on projects developed in

Brazil. Despite the teams in the company adopted ag-

ile practices, not all the agile principles could be fully

applied. The nature of the company (i.e. ﬁnancial

sector) demanded for controlled processes. Therefore

the projects, and the teams, can be categorized as ag-

ile in non-agile environments (Gregory et al., 2016).

In such category, the agile teams apply agile prac-

tices, however, they use some structures and proce-

dures closer to the traditional development process.

In this organization, USs are written based on

software requirement documents. The process of re-

quirement speciﬁcation until the writing of USs of-

ten follows the same steps. Brieﬂy, the US writing

process can be described as following: First, the re-

quirements are raised by the interaction of the Project

Owner (PO) with stakeholders (end-users, managers,

etc.). Such requirements are formally written in the

requirement documents format, which is later sent to

development team. Later, the leader of the project

has a conversation with the development team to de-

cide how the new requirements can ﬁt into a team

work plane. The POs and the requirement team also

answer the questions that the development team can

have about the requirement document.

Subsequently, during a planning meeting, the

leader of the project and the development team have

a discussion based on the requirement document and

then deﬁned general USs that usually are known as

Epics. which is a large US that cannot be delivered

within a single iteration (Cohn, 2004). The Epics

are stored in Jira virtual tool, which is a commonly

used in agile practices (Kassab, 2014). Frequently,

the USs are linked to other complementary documents

that give information about UX or functional require-

ments. These complementary information are stored

Navigational Distances between UX Information and User Stories in Agile Virtual Environments

187

in different virtual repositories. UX information is

found in extra documents, stored into Conﬂuence

in SharePoint

In our investigation, we analyzed 13 requirement

documents from 3 different projects related to the ﬁ-

nancial domain, mainly focused on serving as reports

for ﬁnancial control and risk mitigation. Each project

have about 10 people involved, being these develop-

ers, project leaders and quality assurance specialists.

None of the projects had a UX expert with exclusive

dedication to the projects.

Despite the present study has been done over vir-

tual tools used by the teams (Jira, Conﬂuence and

SharePoint), the results here presented were not de-

rived from speciﬁc conclusions based in the particu-

larities of each tool. The only factor that was con-

sidered is that the USs and other documents were

stored in a virtual environment and not exist as tangi-

ble documents (i.e. physical documents). Also, given

data conﬁdentiality issues, no real data will be pre-

sented in this study. To illustrate how we conducted

our analysis, we will take ﬁctitious data, presented as

documents and artifacts. For each of the three stud-

ied projects, one sample document was created, along

with US and its relations to external tools. Three ex-

amples of documents in PDF format are available in

the link here

4 ANALYSIS APPROACH

Figure 2: Steps of the Analysis.

Considering the underpinnings presented in Section

2.1, a qualitative analysis was carried out by two ex-

perts in UX and Software Engineering: (i) a master

postgraduate student that has about ﬁve years of ex-

perience in agile practices in the industry; and (ii) a

senior researcher with over 20 years of experience in

UX and software practices. Figure 2 illustrated the

four steps we followed in the analysis. After the mas-

ter postgraduate student performed a step, the senior

researcher revised and reﬁned the results.

In Step 1 - Uncovering Artifacts, we did not per-

formed any coding process. First, we examined a set

Conﬂuence: www.atlassian.com/software/conﬂuence

SharePoint: https://products.ofﬁce.com/sharepoint

drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o4251cGs6eftjSGP0D

99yawqbZk4O2gM

of project documents seeking for those that contained

UX-related information. All the documents were

structured in sections, being the main information to

the development team located into sections named use

cases

. After exploring the documents sections that

did not contain UX information (e.g. database struc-

tures), were removed from the documents. Given only

UX information were relevant for our study purpose,

and to avoid misunderstandings during the analysis,

we decided to remove these not useful sections from

the documents. Next we proceeded in the analysis by

reading carefully each document, searching for any

UX information. A document was selected whether

at least one UX element was found out.

A total of 13 requirement documents, containing

a total of 68 use cases were analysed. From these, 45

use cases contained aspects related to UX elements.

The process of coding the documents (step 2) was

conducted in the 13 documents selected in the step

1. The coding process was performed in three steps.

First, we applied the closed coding approach sup-

ported by Garrett’s framework (Garrett, 2010). We

labelled a chunk of a document when we found out

an evidence of UX information. The codes assigned

reﬂected the elements of UX of Garrett’s Framework.

After, we performed an open coding approach. In this

step, we explored all documents creating new labels

for UX information. These new labels represented

UX information that was not explicitly related to Gar-

rett’s elements of UX. Finally, we performed a double

check in all the documents to search for inconsisten-

cies. Figure 3 shows an example of labelling process.

Figure 3: Example of Coding Process.

In Step 3 - User Stories coding, we examined the USs

following the same proceedings performed in step 2.

Given that USs were written based in the requirement

documents, we considered that we could ﬁnd the same

UX information found in the documents embedded

in the USs or related to them. In this company the

USs were stored only in virtual tool (i.e. Jira). We

carried out the coding process having the USs as our

starting point, also examining whether that US had

connections to other virtual tools. Figure 4 shows an

Use case is a generalized description of a set of interac-

tions between the system and one or more actors, in which

an actor is a user or another system (Cohn, 2004).

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example of coding in a US.

Figure 4: Example of Coding Process Did in a User Story.

Step 4 considered the step 3 outcomes to explore

the UX information dispersion in the virtual environ-

ments. We noticed that UX information was spread

in different virtual tools. To examine how the UX

information was hold into the USs, we explored in

which way the information was connected to them.

Such connections could be found through hyperlinks,

attachment, mentions, and so on.

5 FINDINGS

As a ﬁnal result of our analysis, we mapped the con-

nections among the UX information and other docu-

ments or artifacts into a graph-based diagram. From

this mapping we were able to identify in which ways

the UX information could be connected to the US.

Later, we found out different types of navigation dis-

tances.

5.1 Connections between US and UX

Information

In Figures 5, 6 and 7, we can see where the UX in-

formation relates to USs in the different projects we

explored in this study. The connections between two

elements represent the ways in which the information

can be retrieved. We considered that such connections

comprise the distance of one element to another. The

navigation distance appears in the cases that individ-

uals need to access multiple artifacts in a sequence

to reach the information. The connections we found

out are classiﬁed in three different types based on the

fundamentals presented by (Liskin, 2015).

Figure 5: Software Project 1 - Information Distribution.

Figure 6: Software Project 2 - Information Distribution.

Figure 7: Software Project 3 - Information Distribution.

Within / Body connection represents the minor dis-

tance possible to ﬁnd information from a given arti-

fact or document. This distance is present when an

artifact or document is within another or when an in-

formation is within an artifact or document but not as

an external link or attachment. This type of distance

can be considered a characteristic of a container ar-

tifact, which is an artifact that holds the information

together in one place (Liskin, 2015).

Navigational Distances between UX Information and User Stories in Agile Virtual Environments

189

Link connection consists of a hyperlink to an URL

or location in which the information is stored. Link-

ing can be considered challenging when the parts to

link are not isolated (Liskin, 2015). Poor link man-

agement could lead to the artifacts not having their

relationship properly established, causing a disruption

in further information retrieval processes.

Finally, attachment represents when an artifact is

attached to another. This type of connection is com-

monly found in container artifact (Liskin, 2015). At-

tachments can be directly accessed, which makes the

attached artifact to be an easy way to obtain detailed

information. However, the attached elements can only

exists within the container element and cannot be

accessed otherwise (Liskin, 2015). Therefore when

comparing the same with links, this second option

may be the best. However, the distance may increase

due to the navigation to another environment.

5.2 Navigational Distances Types

Considering the diagrams presented in Figures 5 to

7, we applied the principles of graph theory (Harris

et al., 2008) in order to retrieve the distance among the

information previously mapped. Instead of using the

classiﬁcation of navigation distances based on num-

ber of clicks (Bjarnason and Sharp, 2017), this study

proposes a classiﬁcation for the type of element rela-

tionship that the navigation will be performed from.

The information distance is calculated by the distance

between two vertices in a graph, being the number

of edges in a minimum path connecting them (Harris

et al., 2008).

Our results revealed that, for the projects studied,

there are not large distances found among the artifacts

and UX information. Results showed that the total

number of navigation steps required to go to the far-

thest artifacts containing UX information that relate

to each other, varies from 3 to 6 steps. This is an in-

dication that there are no great efforts in order to ﬁnd

information in terms of navigational steps.

In Figures 5 to 7, we notice that to reach informa-

tion held in UX artifacts from US, developers should

have intermediate artifacts or documents they have

access ﬁrst. This result shows that UX information

can be hidden when considering USs as the start point

for accessing it, given information can be stored out-

side the US or even within it but not visible at a ﬁrst

glance. The navigational distance to navigate to other

tools or open an attachment is present and makes the

UX information to require at least a minimal effort to

be seen.

From such results, we could classify the naviga-

tional distance into four types (see Table 1).

Table 1: Navigational Distances Types.

Type Description Characteristics

Zero

UX information is stored

in a single artifact

level (i.e. US)

No need for navigational

distance as all UX information

required is available in one place.

Inﬁnite

No link among two

or more artifacts

UX information is spread in

different artifacts, but there is

no explicit link among them.

Deep

UX information is stored within

an artifact group but spread

across different hierarchy

levels

The more detailed information are

stored in lowest levels in artifact

hierarchy (i.e storing information

in Epic > US > Task > Attachment)

Wide

UX information is stored within

an artifact group but

spread across several places

in same hierarchy level

Information is not stored in

very detailed level (deep) but is

spread in different artifacts of a

same hierarchy level (i.e storing

information across several USs)

Zero and Inﬁnite distances are extreme cases. In zero

distance, there is no need to navigate through the ar-

tifacts, once all required information is stored within

an artifact. The inﬁnite distance, named after a graph

principle that represents the distance among two not

linked points, stands for a navigational distance that is

inﬁnite, meaning that there is no relationship among

the US and the UX information. In such scenario,

the navigation can only happen through a previous

knowledge from the developer. With no explicit re-

lationship available, the virtual environment lacks on

providing traceability of UX information to the devel-

opers. Along with traceability issues, the difﬁculty on

history retrieval may also be present.

For the deep distance, UX information is stored

in a very detailed level, requiring many navigational

steps to reach the information. In such arrangement

type, the information granularity can be taken as a

pro point. However, whether upper UX information

hierarchy levels have good overview, the need to go

down to the deeper levels is low. Storing informa-

tion in depth, may indicate the usage of only one tool,

given that links to different tools would create a hor-

izontal linkage instead of a vertical one (in a graph-

based hierarchy, see Figure 7).

In wide distance classiﬁcation, the UX informa-

tion is stored in different places within the same hier-

archy level, making distances to be spread in width in-

stead of depth. A wide distance type can indicate mul-

tiples tools usage or many information being stored in

the same hierarchical level of a given tool, which may

indicate a lack of information granularity.

Different from deep distance type, where detailed

information are stored in a deeper level inside the

same tool, in wide distance the information is placed

in a separate location, speciﬁc to the type of UX in-

formation it relates to (i.e. a repository).

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6 DISCUSSION AND

RECOMMENDATIONS

By answering our RQs, we can discuss the results we

found out. Regarding RQ1 - How are UX informa-

tion and USs connected into software virtual environ-

ments?. Our ﬁndings revealed that UX information

could be found embedded into USs, as well as con-

nected by links or attachments. By having the US

holding all the UX information, the developers can

get a big picture of UX (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky,

2006). On another hand, USs are made to be kept

small, so the pieces of work can be done and deliv-

ered in a small period of time (Cohn, 2004). Given

requirements need to be broken into small pieces to

ﬁt the US structure, the UX information dispersion in

many USs is a common scenario in agile practices.

RQ2 - What are the navigational distances found

to access UX information from USs into software vir-

tual environments?. From our results, we noticed

that different navigational distances can be introduced

from USs to UX information. By having the UX in-

formation spread in different tools, developers can

struggle in having the traceability of such informa-

tion, which is reported in literature as one of the main

problems of UX integration in software development

process (Kashﬁ et al., 2017).

The distance among the UX elements and the

other information found in the mapping performed

in this study indicates loss of UX big-picture, as it is

harder to see all information, or its connections, when

it is dispersed (Da Silva et al., 2018). The analysis

also showed that UX information was distributed in

several tools and artifacts.Considering our ﬁndings,

we recommend some good practices to reduce the

navigational distance between USs and UX informa-

tion.

To avoid the UX information duplication, the dif-

ferences of UX and agile should be taken into ac-

count (Brhel et al., 2015). UX work should be done

before the actual development, but not too far from

it (Da Silva et al., 2018), and involving develop-

ers (Brhel et al., 2015). Given a hierarchy level of

storage places, placing “generic” information or arti-

facts in a higher hierarchy level (i.e. Epic) is a good

practice when the same can be shared among several

USs. Moreover, whenever this information needs to

be changed, the modiﬁcation can be applied in only

one location, diminishing the issue on having differ-

ent version or outdated information or artifact spread

across the virtual environment.

Practitioners should keep the US linked to UX in-

formation by connecting the different artifacts across

the virtual environments. This recommendation in-

tends to avoid the loss of big-picture given the spread

information can still be tracked. Spreading UX ele-

ments across several environments is ﬁne, as long as

it is not duplicated. Overloading USs with much in-

formation may cause it to hold information that could

be used elsewhere. Therefore we believe that storing

UX elements outside USs should be considered an ac-

ceptable approach as long as links are created.

The creation of central repositories to hold UX

artifacts prevents the UX information to be stored in

several USs, making the navigational distance to these

information to have a limited maximum distance (i.e.

the central repository).Central repositories can also be

seen as “landmarks” in the virtual environment navi-

gation, making it easier to remember and ﬁnd an ini-

tial step for a more detailed search for an speciﬁc in-

formation (Vinson, 1999). This practice avoids the

duplication of UX information or artifacts.

Agile teams can deﬁne templates to arrange the

UX-related information in the virtual tools. Given the

difference in the tools used by the ones involved in

the team, we believe that the merge between UX and

agile should not be in a tool level, but in a link level.

Agile teams should have an awareness about the

navigational distance they could introduce between

US and UX information. We believe that navigational

distance are not a problem if they are kept at manage-

able levels. Given US structure (Cohn, 2004), plac-

ing UX information outside it is expected, but the re-

lationship among the information in virtual environ-

ments should not fall into the Inﬁnite distance type.

Besides, this awareness can contribute to avoid dupli-

cation of UX information and facilitates information

management and retrieval (Soares et al., 2015).

7 CONCLUSION AND STUDY

LIMITATIONS

This paper presented an investigation on how USs and

UX information are connected in agile virtual envi-

ronments. As a result we presented some navigational

distances types, which can bring problems to agile

practitioners on retrieving and ﬁnding UX informa-

tion. We also suggest recommendations to agile prac-

titioners rethink the organization of the artifacts and

documents in virtual environments.

Although the present case study has been done in

the limited context of one organization, the artifacts

and documents we explored are often used by agile

practitioners (Garcia et al., 2019). Additionally, the

theories and processes applied in our study were not

based in a speciﬁc context, allowing such methods to

be applied in other scenarios. We also believe that the

Navigational Distances between UX Information and User Stories in Agile Virtual Environments

191

results can be replicated in similar contexts, although

adjustments may be required to better serve the par-

ticularities of each project.

As future work, we intend to conduct an interview

with agile practitioners to gather feedback about our

recommendations. Based on the recommendations

presented in this study, a structure pattern for UX in-

formation arrangement, and its relationship to USs, is

being developed by the authors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank the ﬁnancial support of the Coordenac¸

de Aperfeic¸oamento de Pessoal de N

ıvel Supe-

rior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 and

grant #2017/03397-0, S

ao Paulo Research Founda-

tion (FAPESP). We also thank the company for pro-

viding the documents for this study.

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