Digging Deep With Research
As a first step into our design process, we were curious about others' experiences with code reviews: what worked well or caused friction. So, we created a survey and sent them out to software engineers who worked on teams of various sizes, in various environments. Nineteen people participated in the survey and gave us a wealth of detailed feedback about their personal processes and struggles.
We used the grounded method to distill quotes gathered from surveys into similar ideas that spoke to the same theme. This process was tedious and lengthy but ensured that we fully captured the needs of those we surveyed. Patterns arose naturally from those who participated; they were describing the same failures with their tools that prevent them from being more efficient, and requested similar features to better support their work.
In the image above, the boxes on the left contain the six most common needs which surfaced during our grounded research. We further condensed them to three in order to simplify their needs and start developing user stories.
Above are the user needs transformed into user stories. Since we are always coming up with more eloquent ways to write the user stories, the words may change as we develop our project further. We aim to use precise language when defining the user stories to have a clear 'who' and 'what'. Additionally, we include a success metric to keep us focused on the users' ideal outcome.