WHY  Personas are important in Agile World 

In your day to day testing activities, think , how easy it would be if in addition to, how to test and what to test, you also know “for whom to test”?

It really eases the job , when you know the person who will be engaged with the application / software for whom you are testing as a tester ?

When we create personas, we not only understand the role of the person at the customer site, but also try and understand the characteristics of a person.

• -         His name, his photo( how does he look like).
• -         Lifestyle he follows?
• -         What kind of personality that person holds?
• -         What frustrates him while working on the application?
• -         What makes him really feel good about the application?
• -         What is that feature that best suits his daily routine of Job?
• -         How techie is he ? what will be a real help to him ( if added as a new feature) ?
• -         When does he access the application and how ? How much time does he spend on the application ? etc.. etc..

However this is the point where you need  maximum co operation form the customer, and he has to understand or in other words we need to make him understand the importance of the persona creation, Coz they are best people to provide us with such data.

There are examples from various projects who have implemented this and got fruitful results, with this approach.

Just imagine if you know that a person who uses your application is a super busy guy and wants to access the application for let’s say only 10 min in a day but those 10 mins are very critical for him to get all the details, and he has not a second to waste. You would obviously make sure in such a situation that you must have test cases related to the response time/performance  and the screen refresh as a person can’t wait for a longer time to get the results.

I implemented a similar thing in my project. Fortunately for us it was easy to create personas , as in my project we also had our Personal Support Officers sitting at the customer site and we had explained the whole scenario(need to for personas) to him and wanted him to convey the same to the representative from customer’s end. We then had a meeting with a customer’s representative who wanted to participate in the activity.

We created a persona template and requested it to be filled in by the key people who will working on the application.

Template included fields like :

• -         Name
• -         A casual Picture
• -         Age
• -         Sex
• -         Hobbies
• -         Education background – Last Degree
• -         Work designation
• -         Work profile
• -         Time spent daily on the application
• -         Your need from the application/ your current challenge
• -         When do you start your work?
• -         Do you ever stop your work ;-) ?
• -         Any other detail that you would like to share

At the end we had a list of key people accessing our application and from the technical department to their Administrative staff.

In this process we got to know many interesting facts about various people using our application which really helped us creating our test base according to their needs.

e.g . we got to know there is a person at the customer site called Mark 23 years of age,who is very technical ( understands the application well) and has the busiest schedule, he starts his work, the moment steps out of his home. He likes to access  few details when he is still in metro on his palmtop. This made us really focus on the screen fit tests for the application. If the GUI looks perfect or not and many other details ?

And there were many such cases and their respective preferences, which made us write some customer specific test cases and we ended up having even more satisfied end users. 

I liked implementing it and hope you will also ..:-)