Using Vision Videos in a Virtual Focus Group: Experiences and Recommendations
This work provides incremental guidance for researchers and practitioners in requirements engineering who need to adapt facilitated meetings like focus groups to virtual settings.
The paper addresses the challenge of conducting focus groups virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic by using vision videos to validate a software tool scenario, resulting in practical experiences and recommendations for remote requirements engineering.
Facilitated meetings are an established practice for the requirements engineering activities elicitation and validation. Focus groups are one well-known technique to implement this practice. Several researchers already reported the successful use of vision videos to stimulate active discussions among the participants of on-site focus groups, e.g., for validating scenarios and eliciting feedback. These vision videos show scenarios of a system vision. In this way, the videos serve all parties involved as a visual reference point to actively disclose, discuss, and align their mental models of the future system to achieve shared understanding. In the joint project TrUSD, we had planned to conduct such an on-site focus group using a vision video to validate a scenario of a future software tool, the so-called Privacy Dashboard. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated measures led to an increase in home and remote working, which also affected us. Therefore, we had to replan and conduct the focus group virtually. In this paper, we report about our experiences and recommendations for the use of vision videos in virtual focus groups.