Motivated by the widespread use of agile development approaches and existing challenges faced by requirements engineering in agile projects, our current research aims at investigating whether agile teams could also benefit from the empirical results regarding information needs that we gained in our previous research.
Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using thematic analysis with a constant comparative method to identify categories and themes regarding information needs and information source use patterns.
Although our results regarding information needs are comparable to findings in other studies, as described above, the results may not be fully generalizable to other wards or specialisms.
Statistical analysis revealed that charge nurses with 5 10 years of work experience differed from the other groups when regarding information needs under the dimension of 'organisation and management of work'.
Among the five requests most frequently expressed by the patients, four regard information needs: concerning diagnosis (40%), about future conditions (61%), regarding a better dialogue with clinicians (45%), and about economic-insurance information (40%), while only one regarded the need for better services at the hospital (bathrooms, meals, cleaning) (59%).
Besides elicitation of and decisions on functional requirements (what the technology should be able to do) and design requirements (what interfaces should look like and how they should be structured to support tasks), the dynamic of our approach resulted in insight regarding information needs, task perception, and implementation.
Although our baseline findings regarding information need and level of knowledge are in line with previous studies [ 5, 39, 40], our results show that the information need (four services) is substantially lower than lack in knowledge (nine services), implying that patients do not need to know about all they do not know.
Empirical findings regarding patients' information needs are lacking for the most widespread diseases in Germany.
Furthermore, the challenge of extrapolating the requirements for written materials from feedback regarding general information needs must be acknowledged.
In-depth qualitative interviews regarding their information needs were undertaken with ten South Australian women diagnosed with PCOS.
