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A survey with 182 responses and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews from practitioners provides evidence that templates and quality guidelines, including INVEST, are associated with improved productivity and higher-quality deliverables, along with 12 usage-and-perception findings.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/","Template",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/presentations/","Presentations",3,{"item":32,"name":10,"@type":21,"position":33},"https://docshare.wps.com/template/the-use-and-effectiveness-of-user-stories-in-practice-research-findings/240204/",4,{"url":32,"name":10,"@type":35,"image":36,"author":41,"headline":10,"publisher":44,"fileFormat":47,"inLanguage":8,"description":12,"dateModified":48,"datePublished":49,"encodingFormat":47,"isAccessibleForFree":50,"interactionStatistic":51},"DigitalDocument",{"url":37,"@type":38,"width":39,"height":40},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/the-use-and-effectiveness-of-user-stories-in-practice-research-findings/240204.png","ImageObject",442,249,{"name":42,"@type":43},"Eliana","Person",{"url":19,"name":45,"@type":46},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-29","2026-09-11",true,{"@type":52,"interactionType":53,"userInteractionCount":55},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":54},"ViewAction",11,{"@type":57,"mainEntity":58},"FAQPage",[59,65,69],{"name":60,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":62},"What research questions does the study address about user stories?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"It asks how practitioners use user stories and how they perceive effectiveness, decomposed into productivity and the quality of work deliverables.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"How was the empirical study conducted?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"It combined a worldwide online survey with 182 responses and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews with selected survey respondents.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What does the study report about perceived benefits of user stories?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"Practitioners agree that using user stories, user story templates, and quality guidelines such as INVEST improves productivity and the quality of deliverables.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":75,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":77,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":79,"site_id":7},240204,1791736813,{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":83},"success",[84,87,92,97,102,107,112,117,122],{"id":55,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":29,"show_sort_weight":85,"slug":86},90,"presentations",{"id":88,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":89,"show_sort_weight":90,"slug":91},12,"Resumes",80,"resumes",{"id":93,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":94,"show_sort_weight":95,"slug":96},14,"Invoices",70,"invoices",{"id":98,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":99,"show_sort_weight":100,"slug":101},15,"Posters",60,"posters",{"id":103,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":104,"show_sort_weight":105,"slug":106},16,"Social Media",50,"social-media",{"id":108,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":109,"show_sort_weight":110,"slug":111},17,"Forms",40,"forms",{"id":113,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":114,"show_sort_weight":115,"slug":116},18,"Letters",30,"letters",{"id":118,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":119,"show_sort_weight":120,"slug":121},21,"Paper Templates",5,"papers-templates",{"id":123,"doc_module":22,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":124,"show_sort_weight":4,"slug":125},158,"General","general-158",{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":127},{"doc_id":79,"user_id":128,"nickname":42,"user_avatar":129,"doc_module":22,"category_id":55,"category_name":29,"doc_title":10,"doc_description":12,"doc_content":130,"file_id":131,"file_url":132,"file_type":133,"file_size":134,"view_count":55,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":22,"is_downloadable":22,"audit_status":22,"page_count":108,"language":135,"language_code":8,"site_id":7,"html_lang":8,"table_of_contents":136,"faqs":137,"seo_title":138,"seo_description":12,"update_tm":139,"read_time":140},4398048949847,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/400002536579ef2da7f?_k=1778318612642679267","The Use and Effectiveness  \nof User Stories in Practice  \nGarm Lucassen, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Jan Martijn E.M. van der Werfand Sjaak Brinkkemper  \nfg.lucassen, f.dalpiaz, j.m.e.m.vanderwerf, [s.brinkkemper](s.brinkkemperg@uu.nl)[g](s.brinkkemperg@uu.nl)[@uu.nl](s.brinkkemperg@uu.nl)  \nUtrecht University, The Netherlands  \nAbstract. [Context and motivation] User stories are an increasingly popular textual notation to capture requirements in agile software development. [Question/Problem] To date there is no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of user stories. The goal of this paper is to explore how practicioners perceive this artifact in the context of requirements engineering. [Principal ideas/results] We explore perceived effectiveness of user stories by reporting on a survey with 182 responses from practitioners and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews. The data shows that practitioners agree that using user stories, a user story template and quality guidelines such as the INVEST mnemonic improve their productivity and the quality of their work deliverables. [Contribution] By combining the survey data with 21 semi-structured follow-up interviews, we present 12 findingson the usage and perception of user stories by practitioners that employ user stories in their everyday work environment.  \n1 Introduction  \nUser stories [6] are a popular method for representing requirements using a simple template such as “As a hrolei , I want hgoali, [so that hbenefiti]”. Their adoption is growing [14], and is massive especially in the context of agile software development [29] . Despite their popularity, the requirements engineering (RE) community has devoted limited attention to user stories both in terms of improving their quality [21] and of empirical studies on their use and effectiveness.  \nThe purpose of this study is to go beyond anecdotal knowledge and gather scientifically rigorous data on the use and perception of user stories in industry. This includes data on the development methods they are used in, the templates for structuring user stories, and the existing quality guidelines. Additionally, we explore whether practitioners perceive an added value from the use of user stories: Do they increase productivity? Do they ameliorate work deliverable quality?  \nEarlier studies have shown that RE practices play a central role in agile development [11,29] albeit on a small scale and in a local context. Ramesh, Cao and Baskervillepinpointed agile RE practices and challenges by studying 16 organizations [26] but they have not studied the role of user stories in detail. Other works studied the effectiveness of RE practice and artifacts through experiments [7–9, 24] as well as the use and perception of practitioners [1, 12] .  \nThis paper describes our conducted empirical research, which includes an online survey followed by semi-structured interviews with a subset of the survey respondents. Key findings of our analysis include the strong link between Scrum and user stories, the widespread adoption of the user story template proposed by Connextra, the perception that user stories help practitioners define the right requirements, the crucial role of explaining why a requirement is expressed, and a positive evaluation of quality frameworks by respondents that use one.  \nThe remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Sec. 2 presents our research questions and describes the design of our empirical study. Sec. 3 analyzes the survey and interview results concerning the use of user stories in practice, while Sec. 4 reportson the perceived effectiveness. Sec. 5 discusses validity threats to our research, while Sec. 6 reports on related literature. We discuss our results and conclude in Sec. 7.  \n2 Study Design  \nThe goal of this study is to understand how practitioners use and perceive user stories, which prompts us to formulate two research questions:  \nRQ1 : How do practitioners use user stories? We investigate the context of user stories b","cbCaiiUrsmVLioHc","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiiUrsmVLioHc","pdf",258862,"English","# 1 Introduction\n# 2 Study Design\n## 2.1 Research Protocol\n# 3 Results (Survey and Interviews)\n# 4 Perceived Effectiveness\n# 5 Validity Threats\n# 6 Related Literature\n# 7 Discussion and Conclusion","[{\"question\":\"What research questions does the study address about user stories?\",\"answer\":\"It asks how practitioners use user stories and how they perceive effectiveness, decomposed into productivity and the quality of work deliverables.\"},{\"question\":\"How was the empirical study conducted?\",\"answer\":\"It combined a worldwide online survey with 182 responses and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews with selected survey respondents.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the study report about perceived benefits of user stories?\",\"answer\":\"Practitioners agree that using user stories, user story templates, and quality guidelines such as INVEST improves productivity and the quality of deliverables.\"}]","The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice - Research Findings | PDF",1789158369,6]