A case study of using grounded analysis as a requirement engineering method: Identifying personas that specify privacy and security tool users

This paper explains the importance (1) of full user-space identification with categorization in requirements engineering (RE) and of ensuring that the categorization is a partition of the user space, (2) of the creation and application of user-space-covering personas in RE, (3) of the use of grounded analysis to do RE to produce a specification as a grounded theory, and (4) of privacy and security features in computer-based systems. Then it gives the steps of a grounded analysis method for doing user-space identification with categorization and producing personas as a grounded theory that is describing the classes of users for a computer-based system. The paper summarizes a case study of an iterative application of this method to arrive at a set of user-space-covering personas for privacy and security features in computer-based systems, and it shows how these personas can be used to inform RE for these features. The full case study and the descriptions of the personas are found in the appendices.