Abstract
[Context and motivation] With the advent of agile development, requirements are increasingly stored and managed within issue tracking systems (ITSs). These systems provide a single point of access to the product and sprint backlogs, bugs, ideas, and also tasks for the development team to complete. [Question/problem] ITSs combine two perspectives: representing requirements knowledge and allocating work items to team members. We tackle a knowledge problem, addressing questions such as: How are requirements formulated in ITSs? Which types of requirements are represented? At which granularity level? We also explore whether a distinction exists between open source projects and proprietary ones. [Principal ideas/results] Through quantitative content analysis, we analyze 1,636 product backlog items sampled from fourteen projects. Among the main findings, we learned that the labeling of backlog items is largely inconsistent, and that user-oriented functional requirements are the prevalent category. We also find that a single backlog item can contain multiple requirements with different levels of granularity. [Contribution] We reveal knowledge and patterns about requirements documentation in ITSs. These outcomes can be used to gain a better empirical understanding of Agile RE, and as a basis for the development of automated tools that identify and analyze requirements in product and sprint backlogs.
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Notes
- 1.
We do not make a distinction as to whether the items belong to the product backlog or to the sprint backlog; in the remainder of this paper, we therefore use the term ‘backlog items’ to refer to the components of either backlog.
- 2.
Thanks to our collaboration with Mendix, we knew those projects were using the issue tracking system to represent the backlog items the teams would implement in the various sprints.
- 3.
Online appendix: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10643450.
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Acknowledgements
This research is partially funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the Open Technology Programme 2021-II TTW, project AUTOLINK (19521). We would like to thank Mendix, and especially Toine Hurkmans, for providing us with the proprietary datasets used in this study.
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van Can, A.T., Dalpiaz, F. (2024). Requirements Information in Backlog Items: Content Analysis. In: Mendez, D., Moreira, A. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14588. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57327-9_19
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