dogtail-devel Proposal: Dogtail user personas

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

So far our work on the recorder has been focusing on the low-level
technical aspects of listening for events and playing them back.

I think we need to go higher-level and think through what the user
experience for the recorder is, and for that we need to think about who
Dogtail's users are (in general, not just for the recorder).

So, with a nod to Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum",
here are some suggested user personas for Dogtail:
(i) "Dana is a developer; perhaps she is making major changes and wants
to ensure that the changes do not introduce regressions.  She wants to
write glass/white box tests for her project.  (She could be working on
either an open or closed source project)" [1]
(ii) "Tommy is an enthusiast who uses and follows open-source software.
He likes playing with "bleeding edge" software, and runs one of GARNOME,
jhbuild, Fedora's "Rawhide", or similar.  He wants to file good bug
reports, and wants to submit reproducer recipes for the bugs he's
finding.  Typically he's doing black box testing, but he follows the
development mailing lists and has a good idea of the changes that are
happening in the code."
(iii) "Karl is a QA engineer who works directly or indirectly for a
commercial Free Software company. He runs black box regression tests for
the various programs that his company builds and distributes, and he
wants to automate as much of this testing as easily and reliably as
possible."

[1] perhaps Dana is interested in driving her program using its UI
without having to write separate UI-less driver code.

How do those sound to everyone?

Dave