Personas¶
The first step in requirements design is the definition of system 'personas' and a selection of success and failure scenarios. The intention is to supplant the notion of the infinitely flexible user and nail down a ‘person’ for which we are delivering software thus reducing the risk of being self-referential. The persona is not the average user but a typical, believable user of the system described as a real person.
The persona will describe any software they use and their level of skill using it. It identifies key work goals and what a successful system needs to do to help them meet these goals. The persona describes their pet hates and even hints a bit at their personalities.
The goal is to generate a persona that humanises the requirements allowing the developers to build a relationship with the persona.
Dana Scully is the primary persona for the BioRails product. Her main requirement in in-vivo research is flexibility, she has always suffered from the previous well meaning attempts to provide data management, always resulting in some awful data loading task on a Thursday afternoon.