Rewriting Semantics of User Stories

Abstract

We describe an executable semantics based on multiset rewriting for user stories — a popular format for describing user requirements. The semantics focuses on capturing the basic (CRUD) operations on data and data flow between actors involved in the stories and abstracts away complex operations as uninterpreted terms (encoding data dependency). The semantics is sufficient for reachability analysis. Translation of user stories augmented with data model into a rewriting system is manual so far, but but the present work is a foundation for a future user story compiler.