Using ChatGPT to Generate Human-Value User Stories as Inspirational Triggers

Recent work has recognized the importance of developing and deploying software systems that reflect human values and has explored different approaches for eliciting these values from stakeholders. However, prior studies have also shown that it can be challenging for stakeholders to specify a diverse set of product-related human values. In this paper we therefore explore the use of ChatGPT for generating user stories that describe candidate human values. These generated stories provide inspiration to stakeholder discussions and enrich the human-created user stories. We engineer a series of ChatGPT prompts to retrieve a list of common stakeholders and candidate features for a targeted product, and then, for each pairwise combination of role and feature, and for each individual Schwartz value, we issue an additional prompt to generate a candidate user story reflecting that value. We present the candidate user-stories to stakeholders and, as part of a creative requirements engineering session, we ask them to assess and prioritize the generated user-stories, and then use them as inspiration for discussing and specifying their own product-related human values. Through conducting a series of focus groups we compare the human-values created by stakeholders with and without the benefit of the ChatGPT examples. Results are evaluated with respect to coverage of values, clarity of expression, internal completeness, and through feedback from our participants. Results from our analysis show that the ChatGPT-generated user stories are able to provide creativity triggers that help stakeholders to specify human values for a product.