Designing a persistent online strategy game - Department of ...

26 Chapter 3. Requirements engineering with non-functional requirements
homogenous group there is no differentiating aspect to the types of stakeholders (i.e.
customers, developers, their age etc.). If the classification is too fine however, it becomes
impossible to cover all stakeholders. An example of a too fine classification could be
to have a group consist of only male developers between the age of 21 and 23 with a
certain income etc. In this case there would simply become too many groups to handle.
About four to six groups is generally a good amount for a project, but of course, if there
is a distinction between several different types of stakeholders and one wants to include
them all in separate groups this number will increase [40].
To handle a focus group it is necessary to have a moderator that guides the discussion.
The moderator is also responsible for making everyone a part of the discussion
by encouraging silent people to speak and stopping other people from taking over the
discussion completely. Another important aspect of the moderator’s task is to follow
up on interesting issues. The moderator must handle all of this and at the same time
avoid interfering with the interaction between the participants too much which makes
for a very demanding task indeed. This is also one of the problems with focus groups
as it demands quite a lot from the moderator [52]. Even if there is a good moderator
available it is also important that he/she does not have influence over the participators
or that he/she is not biased regarding the questions and answers. A moderator can not
for example make judgement on the opinions of the participators [32].
3.4.4 Observing users
All the previously mentioned techniques are of course very useful, but when it comes to
how people perform a certain task none of them is really that good. This is because of
the problems people have with describing what they do. So to be able to gather this
kind of information observations can be used. Observation of course is quite a wide
notion and there are several ways to conduct such research. First of all it is possible
to observe in a controlled environment or in the actual environment that the observed
situation usually takes place. There is also a range of involvement; from the “outside
observation” where the researcher is not involved at all in observed persons work to the
“participant observation” where the researcher is fully involved. While the observation
performed in a controlled environment is focused more on the details of how tasks are
being performed the field-studies are more holistic and thus can capture more of the
context of the work. This is again something that can be difficult to capture using other
techniques [52]. There are several different techniques for observing users, too many to
go into here, but overall the aim is to gather information about what and how the users
do things.