Story Explorer: A Gamification Approach for Teaching Students How to Write Good User Stories

User stories are the main artifacts maintained in agile development and play an important role in describing requirements and making development plans. Writing good user stories becomes a key part of improving agile development. However, effective storytelling requires clear communication, reduced ambiguity, and enhanced testability. How to write good user stories is a challenge for beginners. In order to increase learner immersion and improve user story writing skills, this paper explores a gamification approach. Specifically, we started by creating specifications for beginners to write good user stories. Then, the process of user story writing is broken down, the gamification elements are refined, and the gamification teaching framework Story Explorer is proposed. In a course with 64 students, we assessed learning engagement and story quality. The results showed that the quality of user stories improved by an average of 11.8%, while students demonstrated a high level of engagement. Using Story Explorer significantly increased students' motivation to write high-quality user stories and the quality of their results.