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Integrating the personas technique into the requirements analysis activity

Abstract:

To develop usable systems, it is necessary to understand the users that interact with the system. The Personas technique from the human-computer interaction discipline (HCI) 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 routine software development following software engineering (SE) guidelines. The intention is to improve the usability of the resulting software. To achieve this aim, we first present a modification of the Personas technique, called Personas*. This new technique complies with SE systematization standards. Second, we incorporate the proposed Personas* technique into the software process requirements analysis activity. The benefits to be gained from the Personas * technique are: i) it provides an understanding of the user, which SE traditionally has tended to overlook, and ii) it enriches the requirements analysis activities enabling the software engineer to focus on the people involved in software system use.