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4th i* Workshop Discussion

Areas

  • Applications/pragmatics
    • The research in i* should be with support of industry
    • Unless that we have some feedback about the advantages and disadvantages of the language, how can we think of the future of the research in i*.
  • Tools
  • Modeling concepts
    • We have an RE analysis, we can have on one side secure RE, and on the other side the quality issues. Can i* support all of these issues?
    • Add extra concepts to cover everything, what primitives are missing
      • Only add extensions which cover certain situations
    • There are many researchers working on different aspects of the usage of the language, e.g. the security, trust, and other functional and non-functional requirements. This issue deals with the coupling of i* with other areas of research, i.e. how closely relate the research in security (or performance,...) with research in i* modeling.
    • Is i* adequate for which domain?
    • I* doesn’t cover all the bases, can’t be used for everything
      • It is a very simplistic view to the language; the language should be used WITH some other modeling languages. We should not expect that this modeling language solve all of the problems of a domain (e.g. service oriented modeling, social modeling, etc.)
      • Instead of expansion, the solution is a combination of techniques
  • Analysis
  • Methodology
    • Metamodel and syntax is not enough, how do you use it?
  • KB (collection of models in a knowledge base)
    • Could be part of some sort of professional portal, which may have a charge for use
  • Coupling with other modeling methods, BPMN
    • Link to models covering reliability, security: research question of how to link to each of these
  • Foundations, philosophical underpinning
    • Model is a mean not an end.
  • Community – interactions and community building
    • We should do something to send i* out of our community.
    • Put i* literature paper on citeulike, <istar> tag
    • Hard to search for papers
    • Attracting new people
      • Possibility of working with MBA students for free on a project. They look for ways to demonstrate their marketing skills. How would you market i*?
    • We want to spread i* out of the community, we are experts, but need to help others use it
      • For RE courses, this could help, long-term investment
      • Students use different variants of i*, which is hard to control
        • Are you sure that this problem is not the same as with UML for every of its constructs.
        • Even for UML, almost no papers use the standard metamodel
        • Metamodel is useful for this, hard to teach students when there are so many versions “I found it this way in this paper!”
    • Need funding, but not feasible for standard research funding
      • Have some sort of group, where users pay some not barrier fee to join and gain access to information, money motivates action of consolidation
  • Unified language/metamodel:
    • Maybe we are in the 90’s in comparison with OO modeling and UML, maybe not ready?
    • Research will follow their own way either way
    • From adoption point of view, good to have a metamodel as a starting point
    • Could we have an online discussion about the metamodel propositions
      • Having an online discussion. We can post some of the major discussions (e.g. an vs the i* metamodel). We can use the i* wiki.
    • Take into account early adopters from industry? Early UML was motivated by some industrial partners
      • Since their modeling languages have strong industry support, they can advocate such approaches, but we cannot, we need to sit down and talk w beer :-D
      • Such approaches can help to distribute i*
    • Need to find semantic definitions for things, not just core concepts. If language has redundancies, there will different approaches for the same thing and confusion.
    • Comments on the guidelines
    • Open version displayed on the same page to avoid clicking
    • People need to motivated to change the way they do things, with UML they were business people, made lots of money, we are more of a social collective.
    • Invoke different extensions as service, but things have to be standardized
      • It’s the added extras that make things useful. If we all had that power to access services directly, that would be helpful, incentive to adapt use of i*.
      • Unification; it is interesting to know that i* is a socialist community in comparison with UML which became commercialized. I would love to invoke, for example, Jennifer’s analysis as a web service, and then I can use that web service. If these web services become available then it will help to distribute the modeling language.
    • Process of developing i* and When should we use i*? The situations in which i* can be helpful, and those that it cannot be.
    • We are at a different level, can’t translate directly to code, so harder to standardize
  • Expansions to new areas
    • we are moving to social computing and i* can play an important role here
    • we should think of some proposals about different concepts that are being treated in i*
      • Ok, but we should be careful not to make the language more complicated, or it’s difficult to use in practice
    • to reconsider the i* we should consider the aspects of social computing
    • Presence of parallel research in social computing opens opportunities for grad students, finding case studies
    • Our problem with i* is that it is not executable, like UML, so we cannot make money out of it. Currently there is not a strong agent oriented programming language that the industry can be interested in.
      • You cannot make i* executable because it will be so detailed.
    • There are many different extensions to i*, it’s confusing to know what to pick in what situations, emphasis on the why for extensions
      • Most of the research on i* is based on phd thesis, thus you need to extend the language.
  • Closing thoughts
    • Maybe a special issue of something for paper expansions
    • I* book due on January 2011
    • Next workshop? Maybe with CAiSE next June in London
    • Opportunity for industry session in London as per 4 years ago


Created by system. Last Modification: Wednesday 02 of February, 2011 04:02:49 GMT-0000 by sdeng.