The Realities of Surveys within Requirements Gathering
by David Egan
Requirements gathering techniques include the easy to send, but sometimes hard to develop, survey method to obtain data from a wide variety of people located anywhere. Surveys, however, are notorious for many faults such as ambiguity and a lack of response.
But surveys can produce a large volume of information for the gathering parties to peruse and collate, so developing good surveys is important for both the respondents who have to understand the questions and for the collators to get useful data.
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Thought-provoker vs Data-gatherer
There are two distinctly different types of survey: one is the "thought provoker" which meverts mentions, and the other is an instrument to collect quantitative data.
A key difference is that the "thought provokers" are simply tools used in the process of requirements elicitation: they don't (necessarily) give any requirements, and when they do yield requirements, there is no guarantee of completeness. So while survey results contribute to the analysis, they cannot be relied upon.
The other type of survey requires considerably more preparation than just developing a questionnaire (as per this article): there is a lot of literature around about establishing survey objectives, specifying the sampling frame, designing and testing a survey instrument, carrying out the survey and analysing the results.
I can think of requirements-gathering situations where a survey would be valuable - (eg are there users who use the purple-widget-control-function? what proportion? do they like it? would they be able to function if it only did red widgets in future?) - but they do require a very thorough understanding of what information the analyst or SME needs to make decisions, and what they will do once they have the data. (eg "so the survey told us that 23% of users do purple widgets - that's less than our threshold of 40%, so the requirement to support purple can be dropped from the automated system")
My impression is that the surveys discussed in this article are "thought provokers" rather than data-ratherers.