Elsevier

Science of Computer Programming

Volume 152, 15 January 2018, Pages 1-37
Science of Computer Programming

A case study of using grounded analysis as a requirement engineering method: Identifying personas that specify privacy and security tool users

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2017.08.010Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We summarize the importance of the creation and application of personas in requirements engineering (RE).

  • We summarize the importance of user-space identification with categorization in RE.

  • We summarize the importance of privacy and security (PAS) in computer-based systems.

  • We give the steps of a grounded analysis (GA) method for doing RE.

  • We give a case study of using the GA method to do RE for PAS tools.

Abstract

This paper explains the importance (1) of full user-space identification with categorization in requirements engineering (RE) and of ensuring that the categorization is a partition of the user space, (2) of the creation and application of user-space-covering personas in RE, (3) of the use of grounded analysis to do RE to produce a specification as a grounded theory, and (4) of privacy and security features in computer-based systems. Then it gives the steps of a grounded analysis method for doing user-space identification with categorization and producing personas as a grounded theory that is describing the classes of users for a computer-based system. The paper summarizes a case study of an iterative application of this method to arrive at a set of user-space-covering personas for privacy and security features in computer-based systems, and it shows how these personas can be used to inform RE for these features. The full case study and the descriptions of the personas are found in the appendices.

Keywords

Interviews
Requirements analysis
Security
User categorization
User-space identification

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