Using goal net to model user stories in agile software development

Abstract

Agile methodologies use user stories to capture software requirements. This often results in team members over emphasizing their understanding of the goals, without proper incorporation of goals from other stakeholders or customers. Existing UML or other goal oriented modeling methods tend to be overly complex for non-technical stakeholders to properly express their goals and communicate them to the agile team. In this paper, we propose a light weight Goal Net based method to model goal requirements in agile software development process to address this problem. It can be used to decompose complex processes into phased goals, and model low level user stories to high level hierarchy goal structures. Our preliminary analysis and studies in educational software engineering contexts show that it can improve agile team's group awareness to project goals and, thus, improve team productivity and artifact quality. The proposed approach was evaluated in university level agile software engineering projects. It has achieved an improvement of over 50 percentage points in terms of the proportion of high quality user stories generated by students compared to the standard user story template used in Scrum.