Supporting Agile Software Development by Natural Language Processing - Trustworthy Eternal Systems via Evolving, Software Data and Knowledge - page 93

processing techniques are promising in order to automatically discover these con-
nections. We propose a two step approach: in the first phase, linking , connections
between artifacts and agile practices (user stories) need to be established; we can
here build on prior work on traceability between software artifacts, e.g. [3,9] and
initial work on linking user stories to lines of code [12], to be further discussed
in Section 4. In the second phase, information aggregation , the previously con-
nected data will be used for information aggregation. The goal is to abstract
from the single information items found and advance current technologies in or-
der to support the project owner by automatically providing information on the
progress status to support agile project management decisions.
This paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we review the background on
development artifacts produced in Scrum and on natural language processing.
In Section 3, we describe our approach. In Section 4, we discuss related work. In
Section 5, we summarize this paper with an outlook to future work.
2 Background
User stories in Scrum often follow a certain template to express the roles involved,
the goals to achieve, and the business value connected with the requirement. For
instance, [4] suggests to express user stories in the format:
“As a (role) I want (some goal) so that (benefit)”
Figure 2 shows an example user story for implementing a string processing
method. When starting a new sprint, the development team splits each user
story into smaller tasks that can be accomplished in a single day. Typical tasks
include implementation activities, writing unit tests, or reviewing code. For the
example, there could be two tasks: the first task includes the implementation of
the fancy case method and the second task concerns testing the implemented
method.
User Story 101:.
As a string manipulation library user, I want to have a
fancy case method in order to gain fancy cased strings.
- The fancy case method should print the characters of a
string alternating in upper and lower case.
- Whitespace should be ignored.
Fig. 2. Example of a user story for string manipulation taken from [8]
Many development teams prefer to store the user stories and tasks for a sprint
using physical task boards, index cards etc. But, there are numerous project
management applications that allow keeping track of the user stories, tasks and
their allocation to the different team members. For our approach, we assume
that at least the product owner uses an electronic backlog to keep track of the
user stories.