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observation
subject			fact

observation	has purpose to gather subtle information that stakeholders may not think of telling you
	involves taking a notebook and 'shadowing' important potential users as they do their work, writing down everything they do, asking users to talk as they work and explain what they are doing, and perhaps videotaping the session so you can analyze it in more detail later
	is a subtopic of 4.6 - Some Techniques for Gathering and Analyzing Requirements
	is a kind of requirements gathering
	should only be done during the development of large systems, with which potential users will be performing complex tasks, because observation, and analysing the resulting information, can consume a large amount of time
	takes a lot of time
requirements gathering	is part of requirements and specification
process	see also process^2