Using Crowdsourced and Anonymized Personas in the Requirements Elicitation and Software Development Phases of Software Engineering

This paper deals with the process of crowdsourcing requirements elicitation in software engineering and the alignment of the customer needs during the development phase, through the usage of anonymous personas, and the support of the persona builder application that allows the extraction of such information through anonymized data. Having identified the realization of users and customers' needs in the software engineering cycle, despite the adoption of agile methods, the paper suggests the usage of a persona that represents a set of users with similar characteristics, a pool of personas that software teams may share with each other through a collaborative application, and persona builder as a tool to generate such personas through real user profiles and data collected through third party services. At the end, a demo application is presented, realizing the concept of anonymized, crowdsourced personas.