Personas, a user characterisation, have been widely used in requirements engineering (RE) to enhance the understanding of end-users and their needs. However, the persona generation process is time-consuming and demands familiarity with a user-centered approach. The central issue lies in existing tools for automatically generating personas, which are restricted to generating persona templates and provide limited user control to tailor personas according to their specific needs. This paper introduces CRAFTER, a persona generation tool that uses Large Language Models (GPT-3.5 model). This tool not only automates persona creation but also offers recommendations to users for generating personas tailored to their requirements. The study involved an online questionnaire with 19 respondents who utilised the tool, providing feedback that indicated the tool’s sufficiency for persona generation while identifying areas for improvement. Beyond its primary function, CRAFTER stands out by providing guidance to requirements engineers throughout the persona creation process. The tool grants users the flexibility to customise personas based on their specific requirements, acknowledging the crucial human subjectivity in persona development. Additionally, CRAFTER promotes persona reusability, allowing users to save and reuse generated personas for future projects.

Personas, as a tool for characterising end-users, are widely utilised in requirements engineering (RE), primarily to enhance the understanding of end-users and their needs. However, the efficacy of persona usage in RE practice remains inadequately explored. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview-based study with 22 international RE experts. These experts shared their experiences in utilising personas for RE-related tasks. Through thematic analysis of the collected insights, we propose recommendations for the effective creation and integration of personas in RE tasks. Our suggestions for efficient persona usage in RE emphasise the necessity of direct human interaction throughout persona development, while also con-sidering project constraints. We recommend creating personas that reflect the needs and preferences of persona consumers regarding the information included and the presentation style. Additionally, fostering organisational awareness of the benefits of personas in understanding targeted end-users is crucial. Lastly, we highlight the importance of the interpersonal skills required by requirements engineers to support the successful incorporation of personas in RE.

The majority of Information Technology (IT)/Software Engineering (SE) professionals are male. A potential reason for the low number of female IT/SE professionals might be that the roles and the way they are advertised are biased towards male candidates. The aim of this research is to collect information about the present state of practice of gender inclusiveness within IT/SE job advertisements and how, if needed, we might improve this. We conducted a survey of hiring managers and IT/SE professionals (who are employed in IT/SE roles). The survey collected their general views on gender bias within job advertisements. According to their opinions, job advertisements are often biased towards male candidates. Based on the review and suggestions from our participants we developed a set of recommendations to help hiring managers design more gender inclusive SE job advertisements. This will be a first step toward developing a gender balanced SE workforce.

Abstract eHealth technologies have been increasingly used to foster proactive self-management skills for patients with chronic diseases. However, it is challenging to provide each user with their desired support due to the dynamic and diverse nature of the chronic disease and its impact on users. Many such eHealth applications support aspects of “adaptive user interfaces”—interfaces that change or can be changed to accommodate the user and usage context differences. To identify the state of the art in adaptive user interfaces in the field of chronic diseases, we systematically located and analysed 48 key studies in the literature with the aim of categorising the key approaches used to date and identifying limitations, gaps, and trends in research. Our data synthesis is based on the data sources used for interface adaptation, the data collection techniques used to extract the data, the adaptive mechanisms used to process the data, and the adaptive elements generated at the interface. The findings of this review will aid researchers and developers in understanding where adaptive user interface approaches can be applied and necessary considerations for employing adaptive user interfaces to different chronic disease-related eHealth applications.

Personas have been widely used during requirements engineering-related tasks. However, the presentation, composition, level of details and other characteristics varies greatly by domain of use. To better understand these, we formed a curated set of nearly 100 personas from 41 academic papers and analysed their similarities and differences. We then used our analysis to formulate a preliminary taxonomy of personas used for Requirements Engineering-related tasks. We describe our key findings from our analysis with examples, our preliminary taxonomy, and discuss ways the taxonomy can be used and further improved.

eHealth technology is being developed at a rapid rate in line with advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). As eHealth technology increases, ensuring equitable accessibility and usability for all end-users is becoming a significant challenge. Considering human factors in the design phase of an application will help ensure usability and accessibility gaps are addressed. We conducted a survey with a broad range of users to investigate the relationship between different human factors and design elements that address these human factors. From the survey results, we developed a high-fidelity design prototype which we validated with a usability study to enhance the usability and accessibility for diverse end-users.

Finding a parking space can be very stressful and time consuming. A variety of different vehicle parking applications have been developed but many fail to support diverse end-users. We captured diverse human-centric issues from user reviews and literature, and then created personas that encompass a wide representative range of parking app user groups. Using these personas, user stories were created, categorized and parking app tasks prioritized. We used these to develop a prototype new "smart parking app". A cognitive walk-through was employed using each of the personas and user stories to evaluate the app. With more human-centric factors taken into account in the design and development of the app, we found that majority of the human-centric frustrations identified were resolved, when compared with a commonly used parking app.

Many current software systems suffer from a lack of consideration of the human differences between end users. This includes age, gender, language, culture, emotions, personality, education, physical and mental challenges, and so on. We describe our work looking to consider these characteristics by incorporation of human centric-issues throughout the model-driven engineering process lifecycle. We propose the use of the co-creational "living lab" model to better collect human-centric issues in the software requirements. We focus on modelling these human-centric factors using domain-specific visual languages, themselves humancentric modelling artefacts. We describe work to incorporate these human-centric issues into model-driven engineering design models, and to support both code generation and run-time adaptation to different user human factors. We discuss continuous evaluation of such human-centric issues in the produced software and feedback of user reported defects to requirements and model refinement.