Personas in the middle: automated support for creating personas as focal points in feature gathering forums

Abstract

Many software systems utilize forums to allow a broad set of stakeholders to request features. However the resulting mass of ideas and comments can make prioritization and management of feature requests challenging. In this paper we propose a novel approach for partially automating the creation of personas from a set of feature requests in open forums. Our approach utilizes topic clustering, classification, and association rules to identify meaningful groupings of feature requests and then uses them to guide the construction of personas. Once created, these personas are leveraged to coordinate feature requests, track changes, and to provide stakeholder communication mechanisms. We illustrate our approach with examples taken from the health-insurance domain and then evaluate it against feature requests in the SugarCRM project.