Let's take a look at the survey technique used for requirements elicitation. A survey is a process used to quickly gather information without any type of verification. surveys that gather information without verification are used to understand the process undergoing change. Identify significant areas warranting future study or analysis, and obtained information to help determine the appropriate requirements elicitation and analysis activities. When you're considering a survey, you need to make sure that your questions in your survey are unambiguous. So you need to put some of your requirements specifications to use.

Here's because that's one of the things that you have to make sure of with requirements as well, right is that you're clear and concise. And you need to do that in survey questions to rate yourself as Being a novice and average user or an expert user of the system versus Do you consider yourself to be an expert? So getting specific save complex questions for later in the survey, in the space below provide additional information about how the system could improve the processing of exempt payroll. That is an example of something that you would want to save until later because it's going to take more time and thought for them to complete that question, rather than it being a multiple choice type of questions. And you also want to save demographic information like age group division, gender, for last so that you don't make them feel as if that information is a personal reflection on their answers.

So make sure that is blast, people respond to rewards, so you want to reward people for completing the survey. One reward can be simply providing visibility for the division or department with the highest percentage of risk sponses competition can create more responses, right? People want their department to get noticed and get announced in the company newsletter for having completed it over another department. So things like that don't have any kind of monetary reward at all, can still be a reward to people. So consider something like that. And you can also consider a monetary incentive for random participation like a voucher, or a gift card, maybe a Starbucks gift card, something like that, if your project budget allows for it, when you create the survey, you want to use an inexpensive online tool that's readily available so that people can just access it online and complete their survey that way.

It's increasingly easy and cost effective to develop surveys online and to create an anonymous portal that calculates the results. So it's not something that has to be really technical. really fancy, it's very simple to do, you would notify the participants when the survey is available, and then continue to remind them to participate. So if you're going to leave it open for a month, don't just send them one notice and expect them to respond to it, you need to send them multiple notices as reminders at least a couple of week. And if you're only leaving the survey open for one week, then I would do daily reminders, you also then of course, need to analyze the survey results. This is probably the hardest part of the survey technique, because there may be some poorly performing questions due to ambiguity or confusion, because maybe you weren't clear enough in your questions.

And then there also can occasionally be problems or errors in the survey tool itself. No software is perfect. So that can create some issues when you're analyzing the survey results. So just keep that in mind. When you are using surveys. You want to tailor them to the size of the projects.

They can be valuable for most projects. But I would say for a small project with low risk that surveys are not necessary. If stakeholders know each other know the business and know the technical domain for moderately complex projects with some risk. User surveys can quickly gather information or measure current state user satisfaction or needs. So they can be useful with moderately complex projects. And then with large complex projects with high risk, then I would say user surveys should be used, they're actually needed to measure current state user satisfaction or needs and validate stakeholder assessments.

So if you are working on a large project, especially a large project that has a lot of users that are spread out in different locations, so for example, I worked on a project once that was for a new application with call center reps to us and we had 28 different call centers that had about 200 call centers. Our reps in each of those 28 centers. And if we wanted to get information on pain points that they were having today, and things that they would like to see different in the future, obviously we wouldn't be able to take the time to talk to all of those people. So doing a survey to them was a good technique to use to get some feedback on that. So those are some things for you to consider when you're thinking about using the survey technique.