Towards using focus groups to identify software developer's interests regarding their development process

Abstract

The assurance of quality, reliability, and trustwor-thiness of software systems is a basic requirement in software development. Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehension and detailed understanding of a software project. To make the understanding of a complex software system more accessible, a set of tools that analyze and visualize complex software systems could be introduced. Such a software analysis and visualization tool has to meet challenging requirements to be suited for the specific needs of users. To fulfill these requirements and to provide an intuitive way to understand the software projects with visual analysis, we use the human-oriented method of focus groups. We developed a design for focus groups to identify topics of interest regarding the analysis of software development processes. To test and improve our focus group design we conducted a pilot study with research software developers.