Personas are fictional archetypes based on the real world that represent a group of users who have common goals. This is a concept that is often used in product and software development. In this blog post, Katrina Clokie expand the concept of personas to the software testing domain.
The important thing with personas is the associated knowledge that you collect about their behavior. These personas might already have been defined during the requirements gathering activities of your project, but as you implement this concept in software testing, you will shape the specific testing context to define your test scenarios and test cases. They will also impact the testing infrastructure you need.
Here is an example of software testing personas and its associated behavior proposed by Katrina Clokie:
Hipster Hilary likes to investigate new functionality and areas of the application that are outside of the mainstream. She is an early adopter and an avid explorer. Hilary will:
* Investigate new features as soon as they become available
* Explore all possible paths through a workflow to determine which she prefers
* Frequently use areas of the application that are less popular
* Have unusual data input compared to other clients e.g. different units of measure
Read the complete blog post on http://katrinatester.blogspot.ch/2015/01/generic-testing-personas.html