COSMIC User Story Standard

Ecar, M., Kepler, F. and Da Silva, J.P.S.

User Story is a technique widely used in Agile development. It is characterised as short and high level descriptions of required functionality, written in customer language during the very early requirement gathering stage and containing just enough information to produce the estimated implementation effort. The COSMIC method is a second generation technique for function size measurement. The requirement estimation precision in COSMIC is directly proportional to the requirement detailing level. Current templates for user stories writing might ignore important information for COSMIC measurement purposes. This paper introduces a new template for writing user stories which is more expressive in terms of COSMIC size estimation. We performed a qualitative survey to introduce this new user story template to the COSMIC community, intending to capture the COSMIC users opinion in terms of expressiveness and how valuable it is. The survey points to promising results considering the COSMIC users opinion about the new template. This study contributes to agile requirements from the COSMIC users point of view. This new template may be a step forward in terms of user story estimation for COSMIC sizing based projects.