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
    • 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