31st International Conference on Software Engineering

Tutorial on Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering

Vancouver, Canada, May 16-24, 2009

Authors:
Jaelson Castro, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil;
Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada;
Neil Maiden, City University, United Kingdom

Held on: Tuesday the 19th (morning and afternoon)

Abstract:
Growing experience with Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering GORE has shown that goals are among the key forces for requirements elicitation, modelling, analysis and evolution. Goals capture stakeholder purposes which are related to functional and non-functional requirements. This tutorial reviews the history of ideas and research related to GORE, providing a review of some well-known techniques such as NFR, GBRAM and KAOS, and giving special emphasis on i*.
In particular, we show that understanding the social and organizational context is critical to the success of many systems today. By explicitly modelling and analyzing strategic relationships among multiple actors, the i* 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. GRL, a version of i*, is part of the new ITU-T Z.151 international standard. 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.
Attend this tutorial if you are a Practicing Requirements Engineer who wants to learn goal oriented techniques, an Academic who wants to explore how goal orientation fits into requirements engineering, or a Project leader and Manager who wants to understand how goals can be part of the requirements process.

Invited Speakers:
Daniel Amyot, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) and its Applications
Xavier Franch, UPC Barcelona, Spain
• Using i* for OTS Software Component Selection
Anna Perini, FBK IRST, Italy
• Understanding the Requirements of a Decision Support System for Integrated Production in Agriculture

The Z.151 - User Requirements Notation (URN) standard has been approved by the International Telecommunications Union's
Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

URN is a language consisting of Use Case Maps and GRL (Goal Requirement Language), a variant of the i* Framework.

The standard was approved at the ITU-T SG17 meeting in Geneva on November 13, 2008, together with several companion standards including Z.111, which defines the URN meta-metamodel, and Z.110 and Z.450, which both cite URN.

Thank you to everyone for their hard work in this effort.

The Z.151 draft document is available at:

http://jucmnav.softwareengineering.ca/twiki/bin/view/UCM/DraftZ151Standard

Results of the approval process:

Z.151 - User Requirements Notation (URN) - Language definition

Z.111 - Notations and Guidelines for the Definition of ITU-T Languages

Z.110: Criteria for use of formal description techniques by ITU-T

Z.450 - Quality aspects of protocol-related Recommendations

Invitation to a discussion on whether goal-oriented requirements engineering is already "ready for practice".

• What are the issues that are potentially hindering its application in the real world?
• How can we overcome these?

I'm looking forward to your contribution to the Wiki page Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering - Ready for Practice? !

Online registration closes this Friday August 29. It is also possible to register on site during the conference days.

http://sites.upc.edu/~www-gessi/re08/tutorials.html
tutorial T2
Monday September 8, afternoon.

Strategic Actors Modeling with i*

Eric Yu - University of Toronto, Canada
Jaelson Castro - Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brasil
Anna Perini - Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (FBK-IRST), Trento, Italy

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.

A new i* Guides section has been created to host the i* Quick Guide and the reworked i* Guide. The i* Guide has been modified and is now more structured and organized. It replaces the former long, single page guide. New Guidelines have been added. The Model Analysis/Evaluation section has been expanded and re-written.

Please visit the new i* Guides section. Stay tuned for the upcoming "Top 10 i* Modeling Mistakes", which will be added to the i* Guides section soon. Also, expect to see a call for syntax variations to the guidelines, as per the different available styles of i*.

The material from the 3rd International i* Workshop, including presentations, papers, and discussion summary is now on the wiki!

We are sending out a call for event-related pictures. Please upload your pictures to the 3rd Workshop Image Gallery.

A first version of the i* markup language has been delivered.

You can download the specification here

Additional information and software resources here

Additionally, a survey about i* interoperability and iStaML is online. If you are an i*
practicioner please help us to improve the proposal by answering this survey.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Third International i* Workshop (istar'08)
Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, February 11-12, 2008

http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~istar08


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, organization modelling,
software development methodologies, and more. Following successful workshops in Trento
(2002) and London (2005), we feel that it is time for another meeting focusing on
i*, Tropos, and related frameworks, where researchers can exchange ideas, compare notes,
and hopefully forge new collaboration with like-minded folk.

We are organizing the Third International i* Workshop, and cordially invite you and members of
your group to join us. The 2-day workshop will be held in Recife, Brazil, February 11-12, 2008.
The workshop will start at 9:00 AM Monday morning and finish at 5:00 PM Tuesday afternoon.

VENUE:

The workshop will be held in Recife, in the Northeast of Brazil. Recife was built on the islands and
peninsulas of two river deltas, sheltered behind the wall of reefs that gives the city its name.
The city has several historic landmarks, especially among the over 60 churches. Old colonial
houses and buildings, ancient forts and monasteries and miles of fascinating beaches complete
Recife's atmosphere. The city can be easily reached by plane through the Guararapes International Airport (REC).


SUBMISSIONS:

Each participating group is invited to provide 2-4 pages in LNCS format,
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html, describing the current
and ongoing research related the i* framework. The contribution shall adhere
to the following structure:

- Title, authors, abstract
- Section 1. Introduction.
- Section 2. Objectives of the research.
- Section 3. Scientific contributions. If you have tool support, please mention and describe it explicitly
- Section 4. Conclusions. Especially interesting any kind of assessment of the framework, including industrial experiences
- Section 5. Ongoing and future work
- References. Please restrict to references of your own work.



IMPORTANT DATES

December 21, 2007: Submit Title and Abstract
January 11, 2008: Send submission, including source (.doc, .latex) and pdf files
February 11-12, 2008: istar 2008 in Recife, Brazil

All submissions should be sent to franch@lsi.upc.edu (Subject : istar08)

PROCEEDINGS

The proceedings will be published in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings Series, ISSN 1613-0073,

http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS


Jaelson Castro, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
Xavier Franch, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain
Anna Perini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler – IRST, Italy
Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada

A new section has been added to the i* wiki intended to collect efforts towards defining a common metamodel for i*. Wiki users are encouraged to add their own meta-model to the list.

Associated with this page is a new category for the i* Publications page, Metamodels.

A new section has been added to the list of Publications, i* Modelling Techniques, listing papers which introduce methodologies and techniques for i* application.