FOCUS GROUP AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PROCESS: AN EXPERIENCE FROM THE PRAXIS

Software Engineering research is a relatively new area. Recently, empirical research methods are more and more being used to support the different stages in a software development process. This is the case of focus group, a method that has been extensively used in other areas such as social sciences, medicine, psychology, management, etc. This paper proposes a properly structured process to apply focus group in Software Engineering, as a technique to evaluate results. The process has been demonstrated in a case study on Student Modeling in Adaptive Learning Systems. The results provided evidence on the benefits and challenges of using focus group in the proposed case study.