Improving User Stories: A Case Study in the Chilean Banking Industry

Although a variety of user story refinement techniques have been proposed, there are still few empirical studies that assess their effectiveness in the industry. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods approach to evaluate the combined use of techniques for refining user stories in a Chilean banking organization. A combination of INVEST, 3 Cs and Specification by Example (SbE) techniques was proposed to improve the quality of user stories that were being generated in the organization during its transition from traditional development methods to agility. To validate the proposal, a comparison of case studies was carried out. A group of user stories that were created and refined with the method previously used in the organization was contrasted with a second and third group of stories for which the proposed technique was used. The results show that the combined use of INVEST, 3 Cs and SbE improved the user stories quality and was related to positive changes in the development team motivation.