Automated Analysis of User Story Requirements

Abstract

User stories are a simple yet expressive notation for representing user requirements. They are widely adopted in practice, especially by software development teams that adopt agile methods. In this chapter, we present NLP-assisted techniques that allow to analyse user stories with the goal of making user stories even more effective in practice. We first discuss the Quality User Story (QUS) framework, which can be used to identify defects in the formulation of user stories, also with the help of its support tool AQUSA. Second, we present the Visual Narrator tool that extracts a domain model from a collection of user stories through the use and assembly of heuristics from the literature. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing and future directions on the use of NLP4RE techniques with user stories and related artefacts. The chapter aims to provide a concise yet specific overview of how practitioners working with user stories can be assisted in their work via NLP techniques.