Enriching Requirements Analysis with the Personas Technique

Abstract

A thorough understanding of the users that interact with the system is necessary to develop usable systems. The Personas technique developed by the human-computer interaction (HCI) discipline gathers data about users, gains an understanding of their characteristics, defines fictitious personas based on this understanding and focuses on these personas throughout the software development process. The aim of our research is to build Personas into systems development following software engineering (SE) guidelines. The benefits to be gained are an understanding of the user which is not traditionally taken into account in SE. To do this, we had to undertake two types of tasks. First, we modified the Personas technique to conform to the levels of systematization common in SE. We have called the modified technique PersonaSE. Second, we incorporated the proposed technique into the software requirements analysis process