Personas-Driven Approach to Test Case Generation

Testing a software product is an essential part of the development process. The tests have the goal to improve/optimize defined quality attributes of the product. Unfortunately, sometimes software is developed based on the needs of a single programmer or just because a recent technology enables new product developments, and later—once a prototype is available—the question arises for whom this product might be interesting. In such cases, it is difficult to develop the appropriate requirements that best fit the needs of the final user.
In this talk we describe a personas-driven testing approach, which derives personas based on an initial product idea. Based on the derived personas, we define requirements and tests to guide the further development of the product.
The talk will present a case study in which we applied the method: from the initial prototype, we derive four personas that use the prototype in various ways, we extract requirements and tests.