Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fostering the Adoption of i by Practitioners:
Some Challenges and Research Directions
Xavier Franch
Abstract The i framework is a widespread formalism in the software engineering
discipline that allows expressing intentionality of system actors. From the time it
was issued, in the mid-90s, a growing research community has adopted it either in
its standard form or formulating variations in order to adapt it to some particular
purpose. New methods, techniques and tools have made evolve the framework in a
way that it may be currently considered quite mature from the scientific perspec-
tive. However, the i framework has not been transferred to practitioners at the same
extent yet: industrial experiences using i are not many and have been mainly con-
ducted by i experts that are part of that very research community. Therefore, it may
be argued that some steps are needed for boosting the adoption of i by practition-
ers. In this chapter, we identify some scientific challenges whose overcoming could
represent a step towards this goal. For each challenge, we present the problem that
is addressed, its current state of the art and some envisaged lines of research.
1 Introduction
Goal-oriented modelling is a widespread technique in the software engineering
community. It is used in broad disciplines like requirements engineering [ 68] and
organizational modelling [ 39] , and in more specific scopes as service modelling [ 55]
and adaptive system modelling [ 15] . The intentional perspective on systems engi-
neering proposed by C. Rolland [ 53, 54] had a great impact in the field and largely
contributed to this dissemination.
Among these several existing goal-oriented frameworks, methods and languages
(e.g., KAOS [13] , MAP [ 53] ), the i framework [ 71] is currently one of the most
widespread modelling and reasoning approaches. It supports the construction of
models that represent an organization and its processes as an intentional network
Search WWH ::




Custom Search