Is it a challenge to provide a high quality software product ?
By: Chaya Thilakumara
Tags: Persona Based Testing, Software Testing, Quality Assurance, Quality Software, Softwarequalityassurance

Is it a challenge to provide a high quality software product ?

Personas are fictional characters, which you create to represent different users who use your product. This will help you to understand your end users’ actual needs, expectations and their behaviors.

Persona based testing is a software testing technique that help you as a tester to identify the actual use cases/scenarios that your end user will execute.

For example, let us take the idea of a Stock Trading app.

In order to develop the app and to identify use cases/user scenarios to test the app we need to know what type of people will be using it. Investor !! doesn’t cover everything that you want. It says nothing about your actual user groups.

Below you can see some user groups who use stock market app:

The day traders will check the app every time and make decisions very quickly. If they see an opportunity, they will never stay until tomorrow to see how the charts play out before committing capital.

When it is come buy and hold investors, they might check it weekly or even less often. Buy and hold investors buys stocks and holds them for a long period of time, with a intention that stocks will increase in value gradually over a long period of time.

You can create different personas for different user types, based on their background, experience, knowledge, skills, education and demographic characteristics. First you need to get a relevant picture and assigned a name for your character. You can even select some cartoon characters or super hero characters to make the process more interesting.

Interviews and surveys can be used to gather information to understand the types of people who will be using your product.

Let’s create PERSONA for a DAY TRADER,

John Diggle is the DAY TRADER and he is 37 years old.

Earlier he has worked as a computer programmer for a reputed IT company. But currently John Diggle works from home and don’t report to anyone but himself. He is a successful day trader who earns enough to live, even during his difficult times. He has strong networks of family and friends to keep him touch with the outside world. Most often he spend his free time by going adventures with his closest friends. He always watch the business news for fun and try to understand the cycles and systems that drive stock prices. He uses computer trading models that use technical analysis to calculate favorable probabilities. He has short days, working three to six hours per day and practice making simulated trades.

Next lets create a scenario or a story on how John will use the app. Here I am creating one scenario for one persona, but in reality we need to create persona for each user group who use your app.

User Scenario — John Diggle :

John Diggle was in his car driving to the grocery and was listening to the news. The news mentioned that “ABC” stock price has changed on the stock market. He immediately stopped his car and checked it in the app. He opens the app, and types “ABC” on the search tab. The app provided a screen outlining the “ABC” stock, and John immediately went through an article available in the news tab to identify the stock price change. He then realized that he could make profits if he purchase “ABC” stocks using the app, so he purchased “ABC” stocks from the app.

Other than writing a description as in the above scenario, you can mention how the various personas will use the app in point form. Then that pointed scenarios will help you to work on the development/testing of the app very easily.

Once you have created your personas, you can execute your test case/scenario like John Diggle. To make the things more interest, you can arrange your test case/scenario as in the below image.

Below you can see some interesting film character which I used to create my personas.

Persona of Buy & Hold Investor

Persona of a University Student

Persona of a Person With Some Vision Impairment

So, that is it for personas. Let’s meet with another exciting article.

Till Then Happy Testing!!!!