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.

Children and elderly users typically interact very differently with the same software interfaces. These should be taken into consideration while designing and developing software that will be used by these users. In order to better understand the characteristics of children and elderly users of software, we systematically reviewed the relevant literature. We identified different facets of children and the elderly that are relevant to their interaction with the software. The facets for children are- Special needs children, Interaction with technology and General characteristics. Facets for elderly users are- Technical proficiency, Interaction with technology, Technology expectations and General characteristics. We developed a tool with different descriptions of those facets collected from our review. We collected feedback on the tool from experts and refined the tool accordingly. The personas generated using the tool can be used as is or can be extended by adding more context-specific information to the personas. The tool will help designers and developers of software interfaces to better understand the requirements of these user groups and to incorporate their specific needs during design and development. This will result in reducing biases arising from age-related facets and help to create more inclusive software.

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.

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.