Exploring Story Cards for Evaluating Requirement Understanding in Agile Software Development

From the recent literature review, it is evident that existing agile methodology lacks the method to evaluate the requirement understanding of agile team members for a given set of requirement chosen for agile software development. Hence, there is a need to introduce a requirement understanding check to ensure every agile team member follows the given requirement clearly without any ambiguity. To fill this existing gap, this research paper proposes to extend the usage of story cards to evaluate the understanding of the given requirement and to highlight any challenges and risks in the early stage of requirement understanding under agile software development methodology, if any. This paper primarily focuses to introduce a robust requirement understanding evaluation process in agile methodology. The research results were found to be motivating and were analyzed by comparing the data-points using time-series for performing agile query analysis, agile team velocity analysis and agile team involvement analysis for two agile teams where one team delivered the sprint output using agile traditional method while another team opted for proposed approach. A considerable decrease of ۳۳.۰۷% was observed in the number of queried raised and a significant increase of ۲۶.۳۶% in agile velocity was observed for agile sprint under proposed approach when compared to agile traditional approach. Also, a significant shift from ۴۰%-۸۰% team involvement under traditional agile method was uplifted to ۸۰%-۹۰% team involvement under proposed approach.

Keywords:

Software Engineering , Agile Methodology , Requirement Understanding , Story Cards