Abstract
[Context and motivation] In agile system development methods, product backlog items (or tasks) play a prominent role in the refinement process of software requirements. Tasks are typically defined manually to operationalize how to implement a user story; tasks formulation often exhibits low quality, perhaps due to the tedious nature of decomposing user stories into tasks. [Question/Problem] We investigate the process through which user stories are refined into tasks. [Principal ideas/results] We study a large collection of backlog items (N = 1,593), expressed as user stories and sprint tasks, looking for linguistic patterns that characterize the required feature of the user story requirement. Through a linguistic analysis of sentence structures and action verbs (the main verb in the sentence that indicates the task), we discover patterns of labeling refinements, and explore new ways for refinement process improvement. [Contribution] By identifying a set of 7 elementary action verbs and a template for task labels, we make first steps towards comprehending the refinement of user stories to backlog items.
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Notes
- 1.
The individual tags refer to the Penn Treebank tagset [11].
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Müter, L., Deoskar, T., Mathijssen, M., Brinkkemper, S., Dalpiaz, F. (2019). Refinement of User Stories into Backlog Items: Linguistic Structure and Action Verbs. In: Knauss, E., Goedicke, M. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11412. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_7
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