Empowering Requirements Engineering Activities with Personas

Abstract This paper examines the concept of Persona, a concept which has been used by the Human-Computer Interaction (HCL) field for gathering and communicating information about users, by attempting to integrate the Persona concept into the requirements engineering process and investigate its relationships with the concepts of viewpoints, scenarios, tasks, goals, and requirements in the context of a web application domain. A Concept Development Process (CDP) model is proposed to help guide engineers, analysts, and developers in the development of the persona concept and its integration into the requirements engineering process. The objectives of the proposed CDP model are 1) to enhance the requirements engineering process by incorporating the persona concept into the requirements engineering activities to enable engineers, analysts, and developers gain a better understanding of users’ needs and behaviors early in the requirements engineering process and 2) to identify missing requirements early in the requirements engineering process by examining the relationships of personas with scenarios, tasks, goals, and requirements applied in a web application domain. An online course registration system is used as a case study example in the CDP model.