Focus group: cost-effective and methodologically sound ways to get practitioners involved in your empirical RE research

Focus groups are a qualitative research method helping researchers collect and analyze information from practitioners in industry, in order to better understand how a Requirements Engineering (RE) phenomenon happens from the perspective of those working in the field. It is useful in both exploratory and confirmatory studies. While focus groups have been popular in studies of other disciplines where a researcher investigates ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ aspects of a phenomenon of interest in practical context, the potential of this research method is under-exploited in RE. One reason could be that computer science, software engineering and Information Systems (IS) programs in most universities do relatively little to prepare their master students and PhD researchers on the use of this research method. As a result, the method is partly understood and is sub-optimally or incorrectly applied, or avoided altogether. This may translate in a missed opportunity for RE researchers to engage with practitioners in industry-elevant research that could be both done in costeffective and pragmatic way. This mini-tutorial provides some practical suggestions on how to evaluate the fitness of focus group research techniques to a research context, how to design a good enough focus-group-research process, how to counter validity threats and how to report and publish the results.