Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 8, numbers 1 and 2, 2015 // View article

Creating and Using Personas in Software Development Practice

Authors:
Jane Billestrup
Jan Stage
Lene Nielsen
Kira Storgaard Hansen

Keywords: Personas; Personas creation and use; software development; questionnaire survey; interview.

Abstract:
Personas has been suggested as a strong technique for providing software developers with a deep understanding of the prospective users of a software system. This paper reports from two separate but related empirical studies. The first study was a questionnaire survey about Personas usage in software development companies. The purpose was to uncover to what extent and in which ways Personas are used in software development companies located in a specific geographical area. This study demonstrated that less than half of the respondents had ever heard about Personas. We also identified key obstacles towards use of the technique: lack of knowledge of the technique, lack of resources, sparse descriptions and scarce integration in development. The second study was based on detailed interviews with four software developers about their usage of Personas in development processes in the software industry. We identified basic practices in Personas creation and usage, and found that the respondents understand Personas creation and use differently from the practice described in the literature. In fact, developers are evolving their own practices for creating and using Personas.

Pages: 1 to 10

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2015. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2015

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628