Analyzing the data and reporting the results

98 J. Kontio et al.
3. Experiences in the Software Engineering Context
We collected experiences from three focus group studies we have conducted
(Kontio, 2001; Lehtola et al., 2004; Sunikka, 2004). We provide here only short summaries of the studies, as detailed reports on each of them are available elsewhere see broader account also in Kontio et al. (The objective of the first study (Kontio, 2001) was to provide insights into why and how organizations seek to improve their risk management (RM) practices, what they intend to achieve with better RM, and what impediments preventing more effective RM approaches from being used. Furthermore, we also wanted to obtain feedback on specific characteristics of a RM method called Riskit (Kontio, 1997) and the corresponding software tool (“eRiskit”). The study included three focus groups having 12 participants altogether from several organizations.
The objective of the second study (Lehtola et al., 2004) was to clarify the practical challenges in requirements prioritization. We wanted to find out how and in which phases of development work companies prioritize requirements, and who performs the prioritization. We also clarified which factors have an effect on priorities, and from which sources practitioners gather information on which they base their priority decisions. In this study, one focus group with four participants from two organizations was conducted.
Regarding the third study (Sunikka, 2004), the aim was to collect user opinions about the usability of a university’s website. This information was used mainly in planning the actual usability testing to follow, but the focus group results also offered additional insights. The usability study as a whole consisted of several phases focus group discussion, web survey questionnaire, usability tests, and heuristic evaluations. The focus group was computer-mediated, and it had nine participants invited from the personnel of the case university one of the main end- user groups of the website under study.
We reviewed experiences from each study and constructed a mind map of the experiences and lessons learned. These mind maps were compared and discussed between authors, and the synthesized lessons learned are reported in the following sections. In addition, we collected original focus group participants feedback in informal discussions or in feedback surveys.
We did not track the effort spent during the studies but estimated it afterwards using the Delphi method (Adler and Ziglio, 1996). These estimates are presented in Table 1 by the main tasks.

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