What Should Be in a Persona for Use in Requirements Engineering

Personas are a powerful tool for use during Requirements Engineering (RE). We curated 98 persons used for various RE tasks in various domains from 41 academic publications. Using these personas, we formulated a proposed RE persona taxonomy consisting of several dimensions. To evaluate whether our proposed RE persona taxonomy could aid requirements engineers, we interviewed 20 practitioners to get their feedback on our approach. They reported several perceived benefits of our proposed RE taxonomy, including providing recommendations for relevant human factors in personas, serving as persona templates, and guiding junior requirements engineers. We also identified areas that could be improved: the need to differentiate between internal and external aspects and understand the relationships between them better, providing the taxonomy with clear instructions, and the potential to develop a tool that aids persona generation in RE practice.