What's in a Persona? A preliminary taxonomy from persona use in Requirements Engineering

Personas have been widely used during requirements engineering-related tasks. However, the presentation, composition, level of details and other characteristics varies greatly by domain of use. To better understand these, we formed a curated set of nearly 100 personas from 41 academic papers and analysed their similarities and differences. We then used our analysis to formulate a preliminary taxonomy of personas used for Requirements Engineering-related tasks. We describe our key findings from our analysis with examples, our preliminary taxonomy, and discuss ways the taxonomy can be used and further improved.