A One-Day Symposium and Two-Day Research Workshop
Organized by
The Requirements Engineering Specialist Group
of the British Computer Society
:
20 April
2005
Modelling Your System Goals: The i* Approach (Open
Session)
(City University, London)
21/22 April 2005
Modelling Your System Goals: The i* Approach
(Closed Session)
(University College London)
Presentation Slides Now Available. See
Below.Details
Modelling Your System Goals: The i* Approach (Open Session)
Date
Wednesday 20 April 2005 (one day symposium from 09.00 to 17.00)
Venue
Centre for HCI Design, City University, London
[http://hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/]
Concerned about how to model the goals of diverse actors in your
organisation or project? Unsure how to explore complex goal trade-offs
during your requirements process? This combined practitioner and
researcher symposium will introduce, tutor and investigate the i*
approach - an approach that enables you to discover, describe, model
and reason about the goals of systems that involve many different
actors. Pronounced eye-star, i* is a powerful approach for modelling
and reasoning about the goals of heterogeneous actors in business and
socio-technical systems, and for choosing systems architectures that
best meet these goals. The speakers will present the i* approach and
demonstrate it using 4 industrial applications - from hospital systems
and integrated agricultural production to air traffic control and
software development.
Who Should Attend?
Practitioners, vendors and academics interested in describing,
modelling and reasoning about business and system goals during the
earlier stages of the systems development process. Attend if you want
to know more about new and more effective goal modelling techniques,
how to model goals for the distributed and heterogeneous systems that
are often found in business and safety-critical applications, or how to
use goals to make decisions about your systems development projects.
Structure
The event is divided into 2 parts, a tutorial on the i* framework in
the morning, and 4 presentations on the application of i* to real-world
requirements problems in the afternoon.
09:00-09:30
Registration and coffee
09:30-13:00
Tutorial: "Strategic Actors Modelling for Requirements
Engineering - the i* Framework"
Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada
13:00-14:00
Lunch
14:00-16:30
Four presentations of industrial case studies (click on a title to
learn more):
"Bed Management Organizational Analysis with
i*: The case of the Saint Luc University Clinics" (Manuel Kolp,
University of Louvain, Belgium)
"Understanding the Requirements of a Decision
Support System for Integrated Production in Agriculture" (Anna
Perini, ITC-irst, University of Trento, Italy)
"Some Lessons Learned from Using i* Modelling in
Practice" (Oscar Pastor, Valencia University of Technology, Spain)
"Modelling Complex Air Traffic Management Systems
with i*: Tales from the Coal Face"
16:30-17:00
Panel session moderated by Ian Alexander
17:00
Close
Full details of the program are given below. Click on a tutorial or
presentation title above to learn more.
Professor Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada
[Presentation Slides]
Understanding the social and organizational context is critical to the success of many systems today. The i* framework offers an agent-oriented approach to requirements engineering. By explicitly modeling and analyzing strategic relationships among multiple actors, the approach incorporates rudimentary social analysis into a systems analysis and design framework. Actors depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished. A notion of softgoal is used to deal systematically with quality attributes, or non-functional requirements. Dependencies among actors give rise to opportunities as well as vulnerabilities. Networks of dependencies are analyzed using a qualitative reasoning procedure. During systems design, actors explore alternative configurations of dependencies to assess their strategic positioning in a multi-agent, social context. This tutorial will introduce, explain and demonstrate the i* framework with examples, and describe how to use it during the early stages of the requirements process.
Eric Yu is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. His interests are in the areas of requirements engineering, information systems design, software engineering, and knowledge management. His research emphasizes concepts and techniques for modelling and analyzing strategic relationships among social actors. He has published more than 50 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings, and the co-authored book Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering (2000). He has served on many committees in the areas of information systems, requirements engineering, and agent-based systems, and is a founding co-chair of the International Workshop series on Agent-Oriented Information Systems. Professor Yu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Earlier, he held positions in hardware, software and new services development at the technology division of Nortel Networks in Ottawa.
Professor Manuel Kolp, University of Louvain, Belgium
[Presentation Slides]
This talk will report the analysis of the organizational needs of bed planning and management at the Saint-Luc Clinics of the University of Louvain (UCL) in Begium. A requirements analysis was needed to reorganise and improve the hospital information system. Complicating factors included the complexity and importance of the university hospital, the social individualism of its employees and units (e.g. doctors, nurses, staff, patients, medical units, administrative services), the types of medicine practiced, and the changes to the environment related, in particular to emergency and pathology hazards activities. The talk will also present a case tool developed at UCL that has been used to support the use of i* in different projects.
Manuel Kolp is an associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Louvain, Belgium and an invited associate professor with the University of Brussels. His research work deals with agent-oriented and social architectures for e-business systems. He is also a lead investigator on several projects with industries, public administrations and enterprises dealing with knowledge, information and data systems. Before that, he was a Post Doctoral Fellow with the Department of Computer Science and an invited lecturer at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. He has been actively involved in the organization committee of different international conferences such as UML 2001, CAiSE 2002 or VLDB 2004. His publication list includes refereed journal, conference proceedings papers and one book.
Understanding the Requirements of a Decision Support System for Integrated Production in Agriculture
Dr Anna Perini, ITC-irst, University of Trento, Italy
[Presentation Slides]
Decision-making in agricultural production, and more generally in the management of environmental problems, rests on different types of knowledge and data (e.g. knowledge of biological processes, geographical and weather data, knowledge on the use of chemicals and on the application of agronomic practices, local and national rules on product distribution) that are typically produced and made available by different organizations. In this context, designing an effective decision support system (DSS) for a problem in this domain requires a deep understanding of its organizational dimension to handle all the strategic dependencies between the domain stakeholders. This talk will describe these issues with reference to a technology transfer project aiming at the development of a DSS at use of agronomists. The final output of the project included a prototype of a GIS-based system.
Anna Perini is currently leading the research group in Distributed Intelligence of the SRA ("Automated Reasoning Systems") division at ITC-irst (Italy), a research area dealing with problems in Agent-Oriented software engineering, resource optimization in Grid environment, Multi-Context Logics and logic-based Agents. She participates in program committees of international conferences and workshops. She is the project leader of several funded projects. She teaches Software Engineering at the Computer Science Faculty of the University of Trento in Italy.
Some Lessons Learned from using i* Modelling in Practice
Professor Oscar Pastor, Valencia University of Technology, Spain
[Presentation Slides]
Over the last year we have been using i* modeling techniques to undertake organizational modeling in local software production companies. The experience has been contradictory: on the one hand all the practitioners involved in the project have recognized the benefits of applying organizational modelling techniques, and i* has been seen as a rich solution for that. On the other hand, the resulting complexity has been difficult to deal with, especially when applying i* to larger systems, and some concepts have shown to be easily misinterpreted. In this talk, we will comment on the most relevant consequences obtained while working in this practical framework.
Professor Dr. Oscar Pastor is Professor and Head of the Computation and Information Systems Department at Valencia University of Technology in Spain. He received his PhD in 1992, and was formerly a researcher at HP Labs. He is an author of a large number of research papers that have been published in conference proceedings, journals and books, and he has received numerous research grants from public institutions and private industry. His research activities focus on web engineering, object-oriented conceptual modelling, requirements engineering, information systems and model-based software production.
Modeling Complex Air Traffic Management Systems with i*: Tales from the Coal Face
Professor Neil Maiden and Dr Sara Jones, City University, London
[Presentation Slides]
Over the last 4 years City University has applied its RESCUE requirements process to specify the requirements for several European air traffic management systems. The i* approach is a key element of RESCUE, used to model the goals of and dependencies between software and human actors in the complex socio-technical systems found in air traffic management. It is supported by the REDEPEND tool for i* system modelling. This talk will describe how systems engineers from the UK and France applied i* to model the new departure management system for Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle, and how analysis of these models yielded both a more complete requirements specification and validation of other requirements models.
Professor Neil Maiden is Professor of Systems Engineering and Head of the Centre for HCI Design at City University. He has strong interests in multi-disciplinary research in requirements engineering and applying the results of this research to practice. He was program chair of the IEEE International Conference of Requirements Engineering in 2004 and is treasurer of the Requirements Engineering Specialist Group. Dr Sara Jones is a Research Fellow in the Centre for HCI Design where she oversees the RESCUE process and its related research. She also undertakes multi-disciplinary research in requirements engineering, and has published numerous papers in requirements engineering and human-computer interaction.
Modelling Your System Goals: The i* Approach (Closed Session)
Date
Thursday 21 / Friday 22 April 2005
Venue
University College London
[http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/]
A growing number of groups around the world have been using the i* modelling framework in their research on early requirements engineering, business process design, software development methodologies, and more. Several of these researchers have felt for some time the need to have an informal meeting focusing on i* where they can exchange ideas, compare notes, and hopefully forge new collaboration with like-minded researchers.
Participation for the closed session is by invitation only. We will publish a report on the event.
Programme
( here for slides - password required)
|
|
|
|
9.00-9.15 |
Opening/welcome/kiss
etc… |
|
9.15-9.45 |
Social-Driven Design of Multi-Agent Systems based on i*:
the SKwyRL approach Manuel kolp University of Louvain |
|
9.45-10.15 |
Discussion |
|
10.15-10.45 |
Break |
|
10.45-11.15 |
Experiences with Evaluation in The i* Framework Jennifer Horkoff and Eric Yu University of Toronto |
|
11.15-11.45 |
Discussion |
|
11.45-12.15 |
Strategies for linking Organizational Modeling with
Conceptual Modeling in Model-based Code Generation Environments Oscar Pastor, Alicia Rebollar, Hugo Estrada University of Valencia |
|
12.15-12.45 |
Discussion |
|
12.45-14.00 |
Lunch
|
|
14.00-14.30 |
Modelling Security and Reasoning about Goal Models
Paolo Giorgini and Fabio Massacci University of Trento |
|
14.30-15.00 |
Discussion |
|
15.00-15.30 |
Break |
|
15.30-16.00 |
SNet: A Modeling and Simulation Environment for
Inter-Organizational Networks Dominik Schmitz Aachen |
|
16.00-16.30 |
Discussion |
|
16.30-17.00 |
Experiences in Using
i* in Scaleable Requirements Processes Neil Maiden City University |
|
17.00-17.30 |
Discussion |
|
20.00 |
Dinner
|
|
22 April |
|
|
9.00-9.30 |
About Fundamentals, Methodologies and Applications of i*:
The BCN Experience Xavier Franch UPC- Barcelona |
|
9.30-10.00 |
Discussion |
|
10.00-10.30 |
Break |
|
10.30-11.00 |
Extending i* to Model
Social Interactions and Functional Allocation Alistair Sutcliffe Manchester |
|
11.00-11.30 |
Discussion |
|
11.30-11.55 |
The Tropos Development Process: Research Issues. The IRST Research Group Perspective Anna Perini and Angelo Susi ITC-irst Trento |
|
11.55-12.15 |
Discussion |
|
12.15-12.40 |
From Stakeholder Goals to High-Variability Software
Sotiris Liaskos University of Toronto |
|
12.40-13.00 |
Discussion |
|
13.00-14.00 |
Lunch |
|
14.00-14.25 |
Using i*/Tropos to Reason about Security
Haralambos Muratidis Univ. East of London |
|
14.25-14.45 |
Discussion |
|
14.45-15.10 |
Titile:TBA Paolo Donzelli (To be confirmed) |
|
15.10-15.30 |
Discussion |
|
15.30-16.00 |
Break |
|
16.00-18.00 |
Discussion
about EU projects and wrap-up
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