Ambiguity in user stories : a systematic literature review

Context: Ambiguity in user stories is a problem that has received little research attention. Due to the absence of review studies, it is not known how and to what extent this problem, which impacts the effectiveness of user stories in supporting systems development, has been solved. Objectives: We review the studies that investigate or develop solutions for problems related to ambiguity in user stories. We investigate how these problems manifest themselves, what their causes and consequences are, what solutions have been proposed and what evidence of their effectiveness has been presented. Based on the insights we obtain from this review, we identify research gaps and suggest opportunities for future research. Methods: We followed Systematic Literature Review guidelines to review problems investigated, solutions proposed, and validation/evaluation methods used. We classified the reviewed studies according to the four linguistic levels of ambiguity (i.e., lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) proposed by Berry and Kamsties to obtain insights from patterns that we observe in the classification of problems and solutions. Results: A total of 36 studies published in 2001-2020 investigated ambiguity in user stories. Based on four patterns we discern, we identify three research gaps. First, we need more research on human behaviors and cognitive factors causing ambiguity. Second, ambiguity is seldom studied as a problem of a set of related user stories, like a theme or epic in Scrum. Third, there is a lack of holistic solution approaches that consider ambiguity at multiple linguistic levels. Conclusion: Ambiguity in user stories is a known problem. However, a comprehensive solution for addressing ambiguity in a set of related user stories as it manifests itself at different linguistic levels as a cognitive problem is lacking.

Publication year:2022

Accessibility:Closed