Seminar 1 - Marcus

The seventh chapter of the literature talks about the three main techniques for data gathering, interviews, questionnaires and observation. The text brings up the different advantages of the three methods and how they should be conducted to output the best result. The three methods have different application areas depending on the kind of study. It also brings up the importance of not focusing on just one type of data gathering but try a combination to avoid biases.

Chapter eight discusses qualitative and quantitative data, what the differences are and how they can be used. Although quantitative data can be easier to analyze it is important that any conversions between the two are fair and appropriate for the current study. The design of the questions asked during a study can affect the results and more thought out questions can make the data easier to analyze.

Chapter ten discusses the period after chapter seven and eight, when all the data has been collected and analyzed we can proceed to create a set of requirements for our design. Since fixing error later in the development is a lot harder it is important to spend time creating a well-defined set of requirements. In software engineering there are mainly two different types of requirements, functional which states what the design is supposed to achieve and non-functional which states the constraints there are on the design. If the requirements aren’t clear enough additional data gathering could be performed to make them more comprehensible.

Question - Currently we're only using the interview technique for data collection, could we implement one of the other methods on our study for a better result?