research-article

Building User Stories and Behavior Driven Development Scenarios with a Strict Set of Concepts: Ontology, Benefits and Primary Validation

Authors:

Konstantinos Tsilionis,

Yves WauteletAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1422 - 1429

https://doi.org/10.1145/3555776.3577696

Published: 07 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) offers a way to express scenarios, written in structured natural language, on how the system should act to fulfill a requirement. Such a test scenario is written together with the requirement; this way these two can be conceived in unison, nested into each other. Lots of templates have been written to construct BDD scenarios and various practices were born out of usage. We fail to find documentation on templates. A strict set of templates with a clear definition of the used keywords aligned with the intends of BDD has been proposed recently in the form of an ontology. The present paper (i) evaluates the ontology on existing BDD scenarios found in the GitHub repository (exogenous validation) and (ii) merges an ontology for user story elements' representation with one for expressing BDD scenarios to evaluate its ability to guide the writing of BDD scenarios (endogenous validation). By linking both through strictly-identified concepts, we (i) provide guidance to the practitioner in the agile requirements engineering phase and (ii) with the adequate tagging of elements during the requirements engineering process we get meta-data allowing to suggest treatments to the BDD scenario (e.g. test automation or forward engineering into a software architecture or even code).

References

[1]

[n. d.]. Cucumber. https://cucumber.io/. Accessed: 2020-10-12.

[2]

Leonard Peter Binamungu, Suzanne M. Embury, and Nikolaos Konstantinou. 2020. Characterising the Quality of Behaviour Driven Development Specifications. In Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming - 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2020, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 8-12, 2020, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing), Viktoria Stray, Rashina Hoda, Maria Paasivaara, and Philippe Kruchten (Eds.), Vol. 383. Springer, 87--102.

[3]

Elizabeth Bjarnason, Per Runeson, Markus Borg, Michael Unterkalmsteiner, Emelie Engström, Björn Regnell, Giedre Sabaliauskaite, Annabella Loconsole, Tony Gorschek, and Robert Feldt. 2014. Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies. Empirical software engineering 19, 6 (2014), 1809--1855.

[4]

David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Bryan Helmkamp, Dan North, Zach Dennis, and Aslak Hellesoy. 2010. The RSpec book: Behaviour driven development with Rspec. Cucumber, and Friends, Pragmatic Bookshelf 3 (2010), 25.

[5]

Mike Cohn. 2004. User Stories Applied: For agile software dvlpt. Addison-Wesley Pro.

[6]

Samedi Heng, Monique Snoeck, and Konstantinos Tsilionis. 2022. Building a Software Architecture out of User Stories and BDD Scenarios: Research Agenda. In Short Paper Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Agile Methods for Information Systems Engineering (Agil-ISE 2022) co-located with the 34th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2022), Leuven, Belgium, June 6, 2022 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Palash Bera, Fabiano Dalpiaz, and Yves Wautelet (Eds.), Vol. 3134. CEUR-WS.org, 40--46.

[7]

Sofija Hotomski, Eya Ben Charrada, and Martin Glinz. 2018. Keeping Evolving Requirements and Acceptance Tests Aligned with Automatically Generated Guidance, See [10], 247--264.

[8]

Sofija Hotomski and Martin Glinz. 2019. GuideGen: An approach for keeping requirements and acceptance tests aligned via automatically generated guidance. Info. and SW Tech. 110 (2019), 17--38.

Digital Library

[9]

Kevin Brennan IIBA. 2009. A Guide to the Bus. Anal. Body of Knowledge. Intl. Inst. of Bus. Anal.

[10]

Erik Kamsties, Jennifer Horkoff, and Fabiano Dalpiaz (Eds.). 2018. Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality - 24th International Working Conference, REFSQ 2018, Utrecht, The Netherlands, March 19-22, 2018, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10753. Springer.

[11]

Emmanuel Letier and Axel Van Lamsweerde. 2002. Deriving operational software specifications from system goals. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 27, 6 (2002), 119--128.

Digital Library

[12]

Nan Li, Anthony Escalona, and Tariq Kamal. 2016. Skyfire: Model-Based Testing with Cucumber. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2016, Chicago, IL, USA, April 11-15, 2016. IEEE Computer Society, 393--400.

[13]

Garm Lucassen, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Jan Martijn EM van der Werf, and Sjaak Brinkkemper. 2016. Improving agile requirements: the quality user story framework and tool. Req. Eng. 21, 3 (2016), 383--403.

Digital Library

[14]

Gabriel Oliveira and Sabrina Marczak. 2017. On the Empirical Evaluation of BDD Scenarios Quality: Preliminary Findings of an Empirical Study. In IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops, RE 2017 Workshops, Lisbon, Portugal, September 4--8, 2017. IEEE Computer Society, 299--302.

[15]

Gabriel Oliveira and Sabrina Marczak. 2018. On the Understanding of BDD Scenarios' Quality: Preliminary Practitioners' Opinions, See [10], 290--296.

[16]

OMG. 2015. Unified Modeling Language. Version 2.5. Technical Report.

[17]

Klaus Pohl. 2016. Requirements engineering fundamentals: a study guide for the certified professional for req. eng. exam-foundation level-IREB compliant. Rocky Nook, Inc.

[18]

SEVOCAB. 2015. Software and Systems Engineering Vocabulary. (2015).

[19]

Thiago Rocha Silva, Jean-Luc Hak, and Marco Winckler. 2016. Testing prototypes and final user interfaces through an ontological perspective for behavior-driven development. In Human-Centered and Error-Resilient Systems Development. Springer, 86--107.

[20]

Monique Snoeck and Yves Wautelet. 2022. Agile MERODE: a model-driven software engineering method for user-centric and value-based development. Software and Systems Modeling (2022), 1--26.

[21]

Konstantinos Tsilionis, Yves Wautelet, Charline Faut, and Samedi Heng. 2021. Unifying Behavior Driven Development Templates. In 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2021, Notre Dame, IN, USA, September 20--24, 2021. IEEE, 454--455.

[22]

Konstantinos Tsilionis, Yves Wautelet, and Samedi Heng. 2022. Building a Unified Ontology for Behavior Driven Development Scenarios. In Product-Focused Software Process Improvement - 23rd International Conference, PROFES 2022, Jyväskylä, Finland, November 21-23, 2022, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Davide Taibi, Marco Kuhrmann, Tommi Mikkonen, Jil Klünder, and Pekka Abrahamsson (Eds.), Vol. 13709. Springer, 518--524.

[23]

Yves Wautelet, Samedi Heng, Diana Hintea, Manuel Kolp, and Stephan Poelmans. 2016. Bridging User Story Sets with the Use Case Model. In Advances in Conceptual Modeling - ER 2016 Workshops, AHA, MoBiD, MORE-BI, MReBA, QMMQ, SCME, and WM2SP, Gifu, Japan, November 14-17, 2016, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Sebastian Link and Juan Trujillo (Eds.), Vol. 9975. 127--138.

[24]

Yves Wautelet, Samedi Heng, Soreangsey Kiv, and Manuel Kolp. 2017. User-story driven development of multi-agent systems: A process fragment for agile methods. COMLAN 50 (2017), 159--176.

[25]

Yves Wautelet, Samedi Heng, Manuel Kolp, and Isabelle Mirbel. 2014. Unifying and Extending User Story Models. In Advanced Information Systems Engineering - 26th International Conference, CAiSE 2014, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 16-20, 2014. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Matthias Jarke, John Mylopoulos, Christoph Quix, Colette Rolland, Yannis Manolopoulos, Haralambos Mouratidis, and Jennifer Horkoff (Eds.), Vol. 8484. Springer, 211--225.

[26]

Yves Wautelet, Samedi Heng, Manuel Kolp, Isabelle Mirbel, and Stephan Poelmans. 2016. Building a rationale diagram for evaluating user story sets. In Tenth IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, RCIS 2016, Grenoble, France, June 1-3, 2016. IEEE, 1--12. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/7541913/proceeding

[27]

Matt Wynne, Aslak Hellesoy, and Steve Tooke. 2017. The cucumber book: behaviour-driven development for testers and developers. Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Cited By

dos Santos CBouchard KMinetto Napoleão B(2024)Automatic user story generation: a comprehensive systematic literature reviewInternational Journal of Data Science and Analytics10.1007/s41060-024-00567-0Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-024-00567-0
Wautelet YNassiri ATsilionis K(2023)Investigating Quality Attributes in Behavior-Driven Development Scenarios: An Evaluation Framework and an Experimental Supporting ToolThe Practice of Enterprise Modeling10.1007/978-3-031-48583-1_8(125-142)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48583-1_8

Index Terms

Building User Stories and Behavior Driven Development Scenarios with a Strict Set of Concepts: Ontology, Benefits and Primary Validation
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis

Recommendations

Behavior-Driven Development: A case study on its impacts on agile development teams
ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

Software development practices which enhance software quality and help teams better develop collaboratively have received attention by the academic community. Among these techniques is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), a development method which ...
Behavior-driven development benefits and challenges: reports from an industrial study
XP '18: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development: Companion

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development, such as changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Studies show ...
Generating multiple conceptual models from behavior-driven development scenarios
Abstract
Researchers have proposed that generating conceptual models automatically from user stories might be useful for agile software development. It is, however, unclear from the state-of-the-art what a consistent and complementary set of models to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2023

1932 pages

ISBN:9781450395175

DOI:10.1145/3555776

Conference Chairs:
Jiman Hong
Soongsil University, South Korea
,
Maart Lanperne
Tallinn University, Estonia
,
Program Chairs:
Juw Won Park
University of Louisville, USA
,
Tomas Cerny
Baylor University, USA
,
Publication Chair:
Hossain Shahriar
Kennesaw State University, USA

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 June 2023

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SAC '23

Sponsor:

SIGAPP

SAC '23: 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 27 - 31, 2023

Tallinn, Estonia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
87
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)75
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15

Reflects downloads up to 30 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

dos Santos CBouchard KMinetto Napoleão B(2024)Automatic user story generation: a comprehensive systematic literature reviewInternational Journal of Data Science and Analytics10.1007/s41060-024-00567-0Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-024-00567-0
Wautelet YNassiri ATsilionis K(2023)Investigating Quality Attributes in Behavior-Driven Development Scenarios: An Evaluation Framework and an Experimental Supporting ToolThe Practice of Enterprise Modeling10.1007/978-3-031-48583-1_8(125-142)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48583-1_8

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents