Persona-and-scenario based requirements engineering for software embedded in digital consumer products

The challenge of the requirements engineering to digital consumer products lies in that the users are unknown many of wide variety. The major contributions of this article include a technique to identify persona to provide a rich contextual model of a group of primary targeted users based on conjoint analysis theory, and a technique to identify the value and hot spots in the requirements through the interaction analysis between personas and scenarios. We applied the proposed methodology to mobile phone product lines through a series of field studies conducted with more than 150 users from 2003 to 2004 in Japan. The studies revealed the various aspects of nontechnical users, and proved the effectiveness of proposed methodology in the requirements engineering for digital consumer products.