UI module owner

[Benton, Kevin]

> timeless wrote:
> > i don't have time to hunt for hundreds of wikis and
> > thousands of talk pages and i certainly don't have time to fit my 20
> > or so people into your 4 personas.
> 
> Received wisdom with personas is that if you have more than four focal
> ones, then your product will be over-broadly targetted. I presume you
> disagree?

Right or wrong, timeless, I think that the persona models do add value
to the requirements gathering process along with the rest of the
development process.  It helps us to consider the needs of a specific
class of users (real or imagined) that are likely to use our product.
It is certainly better than what we have now and until we have a better
method, I see no reason not to use them.  In fact, I think it's a great
method to use in other software development projects.  It's not a good
end-all, but it does help developers consider use cases more thoroughly.

Does adding sixteen additional personas add more to accuracy or
precision?  I don't want to waste time checking functionality against
personas that don't add much in value.  I do want a good list of corner
cases, but I want the majority of what I'm trying to accomplish
represented reasonably simply.  If we say that pi is about 3, that's not
very precise, but it's closer to accurate than saying pi is 6.135146248,
which, while much more precise, is very inaccurate.

I heard Steve Tockey say today, in a Construx Software Estimation class
something to this effect (paraphrase):

"An estimate doesn't need to match the actual result.  What it needs to
accomplish is getting an answer that's 'good enough' to lead the user to
making the "right decision" based on that estimate."

That's why I'm wondering if what we really need is more personas or a
few well-developed models then corner cases to handle the "outliers".

---
Kevin Benton
Perl/Bugzilla Developer/Administrator, Perforce SCM Administrator
AMD - ECSD Software Validation and Tools
 
The opinions stated in this communication do not necessarily reflect the
view of Advanced Micro Devices and have not been reviewed by management.
This communication may contain sensitive and/or confidential and/or
proprietary information.  Distribution of such information is strictly
prohibited without prior consent of Advanced Micro Devices.  This
communication is for the intended recipient(s) only.  If you have
received this communication in error, please notify the sender, then
destroy any remaining copies of this communication.