Towards the Art of Writing Agile Requirements with User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, and Related Constructs

António Ferreira, Alberto Rodrigues da Silva, Ana Paiva

2022

Abstract

Nowadays, more organizations adopt agile methodologies to guarantee short and frequent delivery times. A plethora of novel approaches and concepts regarding requirements engineering in this context are emerging. User stories are usually informally described as general explanations of software features, written from end-users perspective, while acceptance criteria are high-level conditions that enable their verification. This paper focuses on the art of writing user stories and acceptance criteria, but also on their relationships with other related concepts, such as quality requirements. In the pursuance of deriving guidelines and linguistic patterns to facilitate the writing of requirements specifications, a systematic literature review was conducted to provide a cohesive and comprehensive analysis of such concepts. Despite considerable research on the subject, no formalized model and systematic approach to assist this writing. We provide a coherent analysis of these concepts and related linguistic patterns supported by a running example of specifications built on top of ITLingo RSL, a publicly available tool to enforce the rigorous writing of specification artefacts. We consider that adopting and using the guidelines and patterns from the present discussion contribute to writing better and more consistent requirements.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ferreira A., Rodrigues da Silva A. and Paiva A. (2022). Towards the Art of Writing Agile Requirements with User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, and Related Constructs. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-568-5, pages 477-484. DOI: 10.5220/0011082000003176

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase22,
author={António Ferreira and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva and Ana Paiva},
title={Towards the Art of Writing Agile Requirements with User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, and Related Constructs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2022},
pages={477-484},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011082000003176},
isbn={978-989-758-568-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Towards the Art of Writing Agile Requirements with User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, and Related Constructs
SN - 978-989-758-568-5
AU - Ferreira A.
AU - Rodrigues da Silva A.
AU - Paiva A.
PY - 2022
SP - 477
EP - 484
DO - 10.5220/0011082000003176