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Invest in Splitting: User Story Splitting Within the Software Industry

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13216))

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Abstract

Context and Motivation: Requirements as captured in user stories often must be split to facilitate further work. There are many different theoretical descriptions on how user story splitting should be conducted in agile software development. However, current research does not give insight into how teams and team members conduct user story splitting in practice. Question/problem: Our research aims to decrease the gap between the theory and the practice by exploring why, how, and what the impact is of user story splitting for the participants within the context. Principal ideas/results: Through interviews and observations, we see indications of purposes which the majority of the participants have in common. Their practices are similar to those found in the literature but not specifically prescribed from any specific source. As a result of their practices, many participants describe that they receive an understanding that they previously did not have. The participants are also able to deliver results incrementally and estimate their work with higher precision. Contribution: We use our results to provide guidelines on user story splitting and to guide further research on the topic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira.

  2. 2.

    https://trello.com/en.

  3. 3.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops.

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Acknowledgement

We express their sincere gratitude and appreciation to: the participating companies and participants, and Abdul Bari, for the mathematical explanations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Emanuel Dellsén, Karl Westgårdh & Jennifer Horkoff

  2. Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Jennifer Horkoff

Authors
  1. Emanuel Dellsén
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  2. Karl Westgårdh
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  3. Jennifer Horkoff
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer Horkoff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Vincenzo Gervasi

  2. University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Andreas Vogelsang

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Dellsén, E., Westgårdh, K., Horkoff, J. (2022). Invest in Splitting: User Story Splitting Within the Software Industry. In: Gervasi, V., Vogelsang, A. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13216. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98464-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98464-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98463-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98464-9

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