Week 3 - Software Requirements Elicitation
We start discussing user requirements and two of the most representative ways are use cases and user stories. We will discuss both of them: what they are about, differences between them and how the modelling process goes on after their definition. We also look into how to write effective user stories for their management and implementation, looking at some suggestions. Also useful are indications given by standards such as IEEE 29148 "Systems and software engineering - Life cycle processes - Requirements Engineering" (replaced old standard IEEE830).
Lecture
- User Requirements: Use Cases vs User Stories
- Example for the user story structure
- Suggestions on how to split user stories (part 1, part 2), from Leffingwell's book
- The main IEEE standard for requirements: IEEE29148
Additional Material
The following are the more recent IEEE standard about requirements engineering (IEEE29148-2011) and the old standard IEEE830-1998 (replaced by the new one, but still useful).
- IEEE Std 29148-2011 - [annotated version] Systems and software engineering - Life cycle processes - Requirements engineering
- IEEE Std 830-1998 - IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications (this is the old one and superseded by 29148! Still, could contain useful information)
- The top-10 Requirements Traps [annotated version]
The following is a sample from the book G. Adzic and D. Evans, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories. Leanpub, 2013, that takes a practice-oriented approach in giving suggestions about the improvement of the creation of User Stories (http://leanpub.com/50quickideas).
- Sample from "Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories"
Tools for User Stories / Use Cases Support
The following tools can be useful to create user stories and use cases:
User Stories:
- Trello (probably fastest tool to start using to write user stories)
Use Cases
- Any UML tool supporting Use Cases
- ArgoUML (probably fastest to start using, there is also a webstart application)
- Visual Paradigm (more complete but you will need a license after the trial and takes more time to learn)