Use of personas in Requirements Engineering: A systematic mapping study

Context: Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the crucial activities in software development that requires a high involvement of humans (i.e., stakeholders). The aim of RE-related tasks is to develop the scope of the target software products to ensure they will fulfil its stakeholder needs. In RE, the requirements engineers have to deeply understand the software stakeholders including their needs, motivations, and goals. Attaining this information directly from stakeholders requires regular interaction which needs considerable effort. The persona, as a user representation, is a useful tool that can reduce effort amount by modelling the software users and being the primary source of information. Objective: The aim of this work is to systematically review relevant studies that have investigated the use of personas in RE, the benefits of personas, and challenges during the implementation of personas in RE. Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) using a formal protocol based on an established guideline. The systematic search result in a total of 904 publications from six databases. After filtering, we select 78 relevant studies for critical appraisal, analysis, synthesis, and reporting. Results: We identify methods to create and validate personas (mostly qualitative), map the benefits of using personas in RE (to ensure stakeholders' satisfaction, support a human-centric RE, and support requirements engineers' tasks and roles in RE), identify methods used with personas, discover challenges during persona incorporation in RE and their respective mitigation strategies, and recommend potential strategies for unaddressed challenges. We also make recommendations for future research directions. Conclusion: The findings of this SMS will help RE researchers and practitioners better understand the use of personas in RE and highlights key research gaps for future research.