Improving User Story Practice with the Grimm Method: A Multiple Case Study in the Software Industry

Context and motivation: Previous research shows that a considerable amount of real-world user stories contain easily preventable syntactic defects that violate desired qualities of good requirements. However, we still do not know the effect of user stories’ intrinsic quality on practitioners’ work. Question/Problem: We study the effects of introducing the Grimm Method’s Quality User Story framework and the AQUSA tool on the productivity and work deliverable quality of 30 practitioners from 3 companies over a period of 2 months. Principal ideas/results: Our multiple case study delivered mixed findings. Despite an improvement in the intrinsic user story quality, practitioners did not perceive such a change. They explained, however, there was more constructive user story conversation in the post-treatment period leading to less unnecessary rework. Conversely, project management metrics did not result in statistically significant changes in the number of comments, issues, defects, velocity, and rework. Contribution: Introducing our treatment has a mildly positive effect but a larger scale investigation is crucial to decisively assess the impact on work practice. Also, our case study protocol serves as an example for evaluating RE research in practice.