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Number and type of users
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Identify how many users your solution must support, and categorize those
users, if necessary.
For example:
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A Business to Customer (B2C) solution might have a large number
of visitors, but only a small number of users who register and engage in business
transactions.
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A Business to Employee (B2E) solution typically accommodates
each employee, although some employees might need access from outside the
corporate network. In a B2E solution, managers might need authorization to
areas that regular employees cannot access.
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Active and inactive users
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Identify the usage patterns and ratios of active and inactive users.
Active users are those users logged into the system and interact with
the system’s services. Inactive users can be users who are not logged
in, users who log in but do not interact with the system’s components,
or users who are in the database but never log in.
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Administrative users
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Identify users that access the deployed system to monitor, update, and
support the deployment.
Determine any specific administrative usage patterns that might affect
technical requirements (for example, administration of the deployment from
outside the firewall).
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Usage patterns
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Identify how various types of users access the system and provide targets
for expected usage.
For example:
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Are there peak times when usage spikes?
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What are normal business hours?
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Are users distributed globally?
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What is the expected duration of user connectivity?
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User growth
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Determine if the size of the user base is fixed or if the deployment
expects growth in the number of users.
If the user base is expected to grow, try to create reasonable projections
of the growth.
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User transactions
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Identify the type of user transactions that must be supported. These
user transactions can be translated into use cases.
For example:
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What tasks do users perform?
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When users log in, do they remain logged in? Do they typically
perform a few tasks and log out?
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Will significant collaboration between users require common
calendars, web-conferences, and deployment of internal web pages?
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User studies and statistical data
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Use pre-existing user studies and other sources to determine patterns
of user behavior.
Often, enterprises or industry organizations have user research studies
from which you can extract useful information about users. Log files for existing
applications might contain statistical data useful in making estimates for
a system.
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