Extensions for Boiler Plates and User Stories: Formal to Informal Conversion of Requirements

Abstract

The customers active involvement has been the focus in almost every software development project in the past decade. The latest and most popular agile developments methodologies require customers feedback and approval during the development process. IT-development companies usually manage requirements using a formal requirement specification document. This document is created and prepared for experts and programmers in the development project. Since customers normally don t understand the requirement document, a simple and understandable version of it needs to be provided in order for them to be able to participate in the development process. The process of translating or converting formal requirements to a simpler or informal version is usually done manually by the development team. The possibility of converting formal to informal requirements has been investigated earlier. Since boiler plates are used in the conversion, an application that support creating and editing boiler plates is required. This thesis will study how this conversion can be performed in practice using user stories, boiler plates and a requirement management application. This thesis will also investigate whether developers from the industry see any advantage in this conversion. The result of this thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes how the conversion is performed, challenges and limitations in this process and the new user stories created as result of this conversion. The described conversion is a semi-automated process. The second part presents the results from the interviews conducted with employees from IT-companies in the industry. A selected group of developers has been interviewed and the opinions about the conversion from formal to informal requirements are collected.