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We have repeatedly encountered in industry-oriented research projects missing stakeholder input and invalid requirements. This has prompted us to come up with a novel idea to mitigate the problem of collecting and documenting requirements. The essence of the approach proposed by us lies in linking two kinds of artifacts proposed by agent-oriented modeling-goal models and behavioral scenarios-to user stories. In the paper, we first provide short overviews of requirements engineering in agile software development and agent-oriented modeling. We then present our approach of using agent-oriented modeling in agile requirements engineering, and illustrate it with an example from a real-life application. Finally we discuss anecdotal evidence received from this and other real-life projects and set future research directions. The main conclusion from the work performed is that our approach enables simple and lightweight identifying, tracing, and documenting requirements.

The use of agile methods during software development is a standard practice and user stories are an established way of breaking complex system requirements into smaller subsets. However, user stories do not suffice for understanding the bigger picture of system goals. While methods exists that try to solve this problem, they lack visual tool support and are too heavy for smaller projects. This article fills the gap by evaluating a novel agile agent-oriented modelling (AAOM) method for requirements engineering. The AAOM-method comprises a visual approach to agile requirements engineering that links goal-model creation techniques taken from agentoriented modelling and connects goals intuitively to user stories. A case study based evaluation explores the applicability of AAOM for requirements engineering in an agile software development process.