Teaching User Stories within the Scope of a Software Engineering Capstone Course: Analysis of Students' Opinions.

Agile software development methods assume that user requirements are formulated as short user stories written on paper note cards. Students often seem to be suspicious about this approach, finding user stories not precise enough to describe the desired functionality. Therefore, practical experience is needed to overcome initial doubts and impart good understanding of the potential benefits and limitations. This paper describes how user stories are taught within the scope of the software engineering capstone course at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and provides an in-depth analysis of students' opinions on the basis of several surveys that have been conducted since the 2009/10 academic year. The analysis indicates that students' opinions are mostly positive and significantly improve after they gain more experience. Students successfully grasp the main concepts and understand the advantages and limitations of user stories. However, better students are more confident about potential benefits and keener to use user stories in practice. Students' satisfaction can be largely attributed to proper instruction of the course, which stimulates learning through problem solving and requires close cooperation among students, the Product Owner, and the ScrumMaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]