Forging High-Quality User Stories: Towards a Discipline for Agile Requirements

Abstract—User stories are a widely used notation for formulat-ing requirements in agile development. Despite their popularity in industry, little to no academic work is available on determining their quality. The few existing approaches are too generic or employ highly qualitative metrics. We propose the Quality User Story Framework, consisting of 14 quality criteria that user stories should strive to conform to. Additionally, we introduce the conceptual model of a user story, which we rely on to subsequently design the AQUSA tool. This conceptual piece of software aids requirements engineers in turning raw user stories into higher quality ones by exposing defects and deviations from good practice in user stories. We evaluate our work by applying the framework and a prototype implementation to multiple case studies. I