Detecting User Story Information in Developer-Client Conversations to Generate Extractive Summaries

• Published in: Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 49 - 59
• Main Authors: Rodeghero, Paige, Siyuan Jiang, Armaly, Ameer, McMillan, Collin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2017
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Computer bugs; Data mining; developer communication; Electronic mail; productivity; Software; Software algorithms; Software engineering; user story generation
• DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.2017.13

User stories are descriptions of functionality that a software user needs. They play an important role in determining which software requirements and bug fixes should be handled and in what order. Developers elicit user stories through meetings with customers. But user story elicitation is complex, and involves many passes to accommodate shifting and unclear customer needs. The result is that developers must take detailed notes during meetings or risk missing important information. Ideally, developers would be freed of the need to take notes themselves, and instead speak naturally with their customers. This paper is a step towards that ideal. We present a technique for automatically extracting information relevant to user stories from recorded conversations between customers and developers. We perform a qualitative study to demonstrate that user story information exists in these conversations in a sufficient quantity to extract automatically. From this, we found that roughly 10.2% of these conversations contained user story information. Then, we test our technique in a quantitative study to determine the degree to which our technique can extract user story information. In our experiment, our process obtained about 70.8% precision and 18.3% recall on the information.