Using Persona with XP at LANDesk Software, an Avocent Company

LANDesk Software spun off from Intel in 2002 and started developing their shrink wrapped products using a variant of extreme programming (XP). They quickly made significant changes to a large legacy system, but felt lacking in their communications with the customer. They expanded their Human Factors team to focus on this problem. The Human Factors team developed personas to integrate the user into the development process. The team had some success with this process, and further improved visibility into the user psyche by working with the development team managers to bring the customer on-site, helping validate the research behind the personas, and improving the developerspsila understanding of the customer needs.