Should we use personas in user stories?

Question

The book User Stories Applied contains single page discussing Personas. The definition of persona from the book is:

A persona is imaginary representation of a user role.

It futher discuss definition of the persona:

Creating personas requires more than just adding a name to a user role. A persona should be described sufficiently that everyone on the team feels like they know the persona.

It also recommends to find a photo on Internet or in magazine and use this photo for persona so that everybody can clearly imagine persona working with the application.

Ok. All these ideas sound good. It can be fun to define personas to user roles but does it worth it? Is there any real or measurable quality or effectivity increase when using them?

Do you have any good example where personas really help development team? Do you use personas in user stories?

Edit:

I have found nice article about personas in MSDN.

Answer 1

This can helps when there is lot of roles and when they are very complex.

The more roles you have, the more complex it is to satisfy all of them. They have different needs, values, power, etc. Having the picture sounds a bit trivial, but it really helps too.

Check this really nice video from Jeff Patton on the subject: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/pragmatic-personas

His website: http://www.agileproductdesign.com/

Answer 2

The reason for using personas is for the team to get a better understanding of the story. It makes it easier for the team (programmers...) to relate to the story on a more personal/emotional level, which I think is good.

If your team has a habit of shipping stories that are not what the customer wanted, then by all means, try the persona approach and see how it works out for you.

Inspect and adapt, as usual.

Answer 3

Personas can be useful also to make communication between development team and business more clear. When you speak more in non-technical terms business might understand you more clearly.

Instead of the description

The application administrator will maintain the db structure and the application code

you will use persona Frank:

Frank is responsible for technical issues of our application. He understands the database. He does not teach the users how to work with the application but in case of any problems he can solve them.

I still am not sure whether to describe personas with real emotions, e.g. "Frank is not very happy to help the users all the time so the users should not disturb him often".

Answer 4

On the other hand, you could have Persona "Petr".

"Petr likes to drink lots of beer. Petr only uses his computer when he is drunk. Petr's requirements depend on his blood alcohol level. Petr likes to program his computer. His best code is written after 12 litres of Pilsner, and he doesn't write code unless he has consumed at least 6 litres of Pilsner. "

What producing Personas does is help the analysts really understand what they are writing about. It helps you discover requirements you would normally overlook.