User Story Risk Prioritization Model for Agile Software Development

User stories capture software requirements for an agile software project. One of the problems that cause project failure is that the project does not consider risks that result from low-quality user stories from the beginning and hence does not prepare for such risks. That causes an impact on both software development and project management. This paper presents a user story risk prioritization model to raise the project awareness on user story risks and risk prioritization for better responses to the risks. The model describes 10 user story risks and 2 main criteria for risk prioritization, i.e. impact of occurrence that consists of 10 subcriteria and probability of occurrence that consists of 1 subcriterion. The model has been evaluated by members of agile teams who have experiences in agile software development. To prioritize user story risks, the model can be used with other methods, such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) or weighted scoring method, to rank the user story risks by the criteria and determine priorities of the risks. In this research, the AHP has been applied with the proposed model to prioritize user story risks of an agile software project. The experiment shows that the risk prioritization results from the model are consistent with the actual risk situation of the experimental project. The proposed model therefore can be used as a supporting tool for risk management in an agile software project.