Investigating the Link between User Stories and Documentation Debt on Software Projects

Technical debt is a metaphor that describes the effect of immature artefacts in software development. One of its types is documentation debt, which can be identified by locating missing, inadequate or incomplete artefacts in software projects. Nowadays, we can observe more organizations using agile methods to support their activities. In particular, the use of user stories reduces the focus on requirement specification tasks and, as a consequence, creates difficulties that need to be overcame by the development team. In order to investigate these difficulties and assess whether they create a favourable scenario for incurring documentation debt, this paper presents the results of a literature review and an exploratory study. The results from both studies allowed us to identify a list of causes that can lead the development team to incur documentation debt when working with agile requirements. This is an important step in order to manage the technical debt from a preventive perspective.