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Jobs-to-be-Done Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Method for Defining Job Stories

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10753))

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Goal orientation is an unrealized promise in the practice of requirements engineering (RE). Conversely, lightweight approaches such as user stories have gained substantial adoption. As critics highlight the limitations of user stories, Job Stories are emerging as an alternative that embeds goal-oriented principles by emphasizing situation, motivation and expected outcome. This new approach has not been studied in research yet. [Question/Problem] Scientific foundations are lacking for the job story artifact and there are no actionable methods for effectively applying job stories. Thus, practitioners may end up creating their own flavor of job stories that may fail to deliver the promised value of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory. [Principal ideas/results] We integrate multiple approaches based on job stories to create a conceptual model of job stories and to construct a generic method for Jobs-to-be-Done Oriented RE. Applying our job story method to an industry case study, we highlight benefits and limitations. [Contribution] Our method aims to bring job stories from craft to discipline, and to provide systematic means for applying Jobs-to-be-Done orientation in practice and for assessing its effectiveness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The dataset of this paper is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/xpcv3jb6b4.1.

  2. 2.

    We adopt Klement’s syntax for the jobs: the customer hires a product to get jobs done.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RE-Lab, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Garm Lucassen, Maxim van de Keuken, Fabiano Dalpiaz & Sjaak Brinkkemper

  2. Stabiplan, Bodegraven, The Netherlands

    Gijs Willem Sloof & Johan Schlingmann

Authors
  1. Garm Lucassen
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  2. Maxim van de Keuken
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  3. Fabiano Dalpiaz
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  4. Sjaak Brinkkemper
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  5. Gijs Willem Sloof
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  6. Johan Schlingmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabiano Dalpiaz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Dortmund, Germany

    Erik Kamsties

  2. Chalmers and University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Jennifer Horkoff

  3. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Fabiano Dalpiaz

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Lucassen, G., van de Keuken, M., Dalpiaz, F., Brinkkemper, S., Sloof, G.W., Schlingmann, J. (2018). Jobs-to-be-Done Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Method for Defining Job Stories. In: Kamsties, E., Horkoff, J., Dalpiaz, F. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10753. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77242-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77243-1

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