Supporting Agile Software Development by Natural Language Processing - Trustworthy Eternal Systems via Evolving, Software Data and Knowledge - page 101

working on a new user story and its test script, NLP techniques are applied for
extracting the nouns and verbs contained in the story. The extracted entities
enable to find similar test steps by consulting the ontology, fostering ecient
test code reuse.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper, we have presented the idea of using natural language processing
techniques for supporting agile development. By analyzing the artifacts created
during development activities, such as writing code, committing a patch, or filing
a bug report, connections are established between the user stories which repre-
sent the system requirements. This supports the roles representing the stake-
holders, such as product owners in a Scrum project, to understand what the
team has actually produced during a development cycle.
Although user stories are expressed in free-form text, they are typically not
free of form. Instead, certain templates are followed, which encode roles, goals or
organizational benefits. Similar applies to artifacts such as source code, commit
messages, or bug reports. This allows using proven NLP techniques to create
structured representations, which in turn enables finding interdependencies.
The next step and challenge is to create a suitable training set to evaluate the
presented approach. For example, an agile open source software project can be
taken as a starting point.
Acknowledgements. This research has been supported by the European Com-
munitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grants
#247758 (EternalS) and #288024 (LiMoSINe).
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