A contribuição de stakeholders não técnicos na elicitação de aspectos da experiência do usuário: uma abordagem usando proto-personas

Abstract

The requirements elicitation is a main step in an application development. Usually the requirements are listed and described with little to none participation of the stakeholders that have knowledge of the application’s domain. The stakeholders are the interested people in one product, but in most cases, only the technical stakeholder are incorporated during the system’s implementation. While the non-technical stakeholders hold an unused knowledge during the software construction. Therefore, exists a few studies that explore the active participation of non-technical stakeholders during requirement elicitation. There are several techniques that could be used during the elicitation and description of the requirements. Commonly the techniques used are questionnaires, interviews, observation, etc. Yet, it is still possible to observe that there’s is little use of the techniques that put in the center of the process the user and their needs. But the persona shows itself as a relevant technique to consider the user needs and use experience. A variation of the persona called proto-persona is a technique that permits the creation of an artifact that characterizes a group of users by using the specific knowledge from a domain expert. That way, gathering information about the application and its possible users. The proto-persona is a tool to evaluate the stakeholder participation during the software development. This master’s project has the objective to investigate the non-technical stakeholder contribution during the requirements elicitation. Especially the requirements related to aspects of user experience. To investigate and evaluate the contribution of different types of stakeholders, it was defined an empirical study divided into three steps. The first study focused in to investigate how the stakeholders used the proto-personas technique during the elicitation of the requirements to a given application. The second study explored the use of the first study’s artifacts as support to design a solution to the application. And the third study evaluated how the second study’s solutions were adequate to a set of final users. The results indicated through a detailed analysis (quantitative and qualitative) reveal that both non-technical and technical stakeholders contribute uniquely to the application. Both stakeholders focused on different aspects and enrich the software development.