Create a test persona for your testing space

A test persona is the learner your test bot plays: its name, a one-line description, and the prompt that shapes how it behaves in the conversation. Cesura maintains one persona library, grouped by what each persona tests, and offers it in every testing space. The personas that find the real weaknesses in your simulation are often the ones you tailor yourself: the specific difficult parent, the specific evasive patient, the specific junior who agrees with everything.

Where personas come from

Every testing space offers the personas in the Cesura library. Organizations do not have a library of their own. To tailor a persona, you edit or clone it for one simulation, from that simulation's test bot console. Your change applies when testing that simulation, and nowhere else.

For the list of personas and what each tier proves, see Testing Your Simulations with the Automated Test Bot.

Before you start

Changing personas needs edit rights on the simulation. A tester who can only view the simulation can run tests with any persona, but does not see Persona actions.

Create a persona for one simulation

Open the test bot console for your simulation (Testing Spaces → your space → Automatic Testing), then:

1. If a transcript or report is showing, click New test to go back to the persona cards.
2. Under Pick the test bot's persona, click the persona closest to what you want. To find an edge case, open Edge-case personas.
3. Click Persona actions and choose Clone Persona.
4. Fill in Display Name (required, up to 100 characters), Description (up to 500), and Prompt (required).
5. Click Create.

The new persona is selected straight away, so you can start a test with it immediately. A clone stays in the same tier as the persona you cloned it from.

The description is what everyone else reads when they hover over the persona, so write it for them: "Agrees with everything, then does nothing" tells a colleague more than "Difficult user 2".

Writing the prompt

The prompt is instructions to the bot about how to play the learner. It is added to the simulation's own brief rather than replacing it, so describe behaviour, not the scenario. The scenario is already there, and the bot takes its role from the simulation's introduction.

What tends to work:

• Say what they do, not what they are. "Interrupts before you finish a sentence" beats "impatient".
• Give them one motive. A persona pulling in three directions plays as noise, and you cannot tell what your character failed at.
• Say what would change their mind. A learner who can never be satisfied tests nothing, because there was no path to success to miss.
• Keep it about the learner. Instructions about how the character should respond belong in the simulation, not the persona.

Editing, hiding and resetting

All three are under Persona actions, and all three affect only the current simulation.

Hiding is deliberately not deletion. A finished run has to keep naming the persona it played, otherwise reports from last term stop making sense the moment you tidy up the list.

Where the persona shows up afterwards

Reports name the persona each test run played, including personas you have since hidden.

Related articles

• Testing Your Simulations with the Automated Test Bot
• What is a Testing Space?
• Simulation Instructions: briefing the AI character