Not too long ago on one of the slack channels (it could have been Ministry of Testing I think) someone asked about a template for user personas. I immediately thought of Generic Testing Personas by Katrina Clokie. Just today I read a blog post about Persona based testing.
All of this got me thinking about the different user personas we may adopt and why we adopt them. I am guilty of becoming quite closed minded with persona based testing. Some of my best bugs come from pretending I’m my mum (the impatient user), clicking all around the screen, reading all the fine print on a throttled internet connection. I find that I consider more personas during requirements writing than I do later in the process (post code being written).
What personas do you use for testing? Do you use them all through the development cycle or only at certain points? Are there any you’ve stopped using? Was it because of time constraints or other reasons?