Requirements Analysis — Data Collection Methods: 19-Soft-B2 User Interface, May 2014, Q11

Question 11: Requirements Analysis — Data Collection Methods (10 marks)

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Requirements analysis would begin by identifying the relevant stakeholder groups (pharmacists across different units, nursing staff who indirectly depend on the library's content, IT staff who will deploy the Windows software) and then gathering data through a combination of complementary methods, each cross-checked against the others (triangulation, Question 8), before synthesising the findings into a documented, prioritised requirements set reviewed with stakeholders.

Data collection methods used in the requirements analysis
Method	Advantage	Disadvantage
Semi-structured interviews with pharmacists	Surfaces goals, priorities and pain points in the pharmacist's own words, including tacit needs a form could not anticipate	Time-consuming to conduct and analyse across enough participants; answers reflect what people say they do, not necessarily what they actually do
Direct observation / contextual inquiry in the pharmacy	Reveals the real workflow and workarounds around the current process, including steps pharmacists would not think to mention	Presence of an observer can change behaviour (observer effect); only captures the specific sessions observed, which may not be representative
Questionnaires/surveys across multiple hospital sites	Scales cheaply to a large, geographically distributed sample of pharmacists, giving broader statistical coverage	Limited depth — closed questions cannot probe an unanticipated need, and response rates/quality vary
Document analysis (existing paper drug-formulary records, incident reports on programming errors with current pumps)	Grounds requirements in objective, already-recorded evidence rather than recollection, at low cost	Reflects only what was recorded, in the form it was recorded in, and cannot answer "why" a documented event happened

Concept & Theory

Topic. Requirements analysis via complementary data-gathering methods.

Key relations. Requirements analysis = stakeholder identification → multi-method data gathering → triangulated synthesis → documented, prioritised, stakeholder-reviewed requirements.

Why this works. No single method captures both what users say and what they actually do, at both individual depth and population scale; combining interviews, observation, surveys and document analysis covers those complementary gaps.

Common pitfall. Relying on a single method (most often, interviews or a requirements workshop alone) and mistaking stated requirements for the complete, accurate picture of actual need.

Source. Rogers, Sharp & Preece, Interaction Design, 5th ed., Ch. 10–11 (Understanding requirements, data gathering).

Question 11 of 14: Requirements Analysis — Data Collection Methods

Question 11: Requirements Analysis — Data Collection Methods (10 marks)