Verifying goal-oriented specifications used in model-driven development processes

[EN] Goal-oriented requirements engineering promotes the use of goals to elicit, elaborate, structure, specify, analyze, negotiate, document, and modify requirements. Thus, goal-oriented specifications are essential for capturing the objectives that the system to be developed should achieve. However, the application of goal oriented specifications into model-driven development (MDD) processes is still handcrafted, not aligned in the automated flow from models to code. In other words, the experience of analysts and designers is necessary to manually transform the input goal-oriented models into system models for code generation (models compilation). Some authors have proposed guidelines to facilitate and partially automate this translation, but there is a lack of techniques to assess the adequacy of goal-oriented models as starting point of MDD processes. In this paper, we present and evaluate a verification approach that guarantees the automatic, correct, and complete transformation of goal-oriented models into design models used by specific MDD solutions. In particular, this approach has been put into practice by adopting a well-known goal-oriented modeling approach, the i* framework, and an industrial MDD solution called Integranova.This work has been developed with the support of FONDECYT under the projects AMoDDI 11130583 and TESTMODE 11121395.This work is also supported by EOSSAC project, funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish government (TIN2013-44641-P).Giachetti Herrera, GA.; Marín, B.; López, L.; Franch, X.; Pastor López, O. (2017). Verifying goal-oriented specifications used in model-driven development processes. Information Systems. 64:41-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2016.06.011S41626

An empirical study on the use of i* by non-technical stakeholders: the case of strategic dependency diagrams

Early phases of information systems engineering include the understanding of the enterprise’s context and the construction of models at different levels of decomposition, required to design the system architecture. These time-consuming activities are usually conducted by relatively large teams, composed of groups of non-technical stakeholders playing mostly an informative role (i.e. not involved in documentation and even less in modelling), led by few experienced technical consultants performing most of the documenting and modelling effort. This paper evaluates the ability of non-technical stakeholders to create strategic dependency diagrams written with the i* language in the design of the context model of a system architecture, and find out which difficulties they may encounter and what the quality of the models they build is. A case study involving non-technical stakeholders from 11 organizational areas in an Ecuadorian university held under the supervision and coordination of the two authors acting as consultants. The non-technical stakeholders identified the majority of the dependencies that should appear in the case study’s context model, although they experienced some difficulties in declaring the type of dependency, representing such dependencies graphically and applying the description guidelines provided in the training. Managers were observed to make more mistakes than other more operational roles. From the observations of these results, a set of methodological advices were compiled for their use in future, similar endeavours. It is concluded that non-technical stakeholders can take an active role in the construction of the context model. This conclusion is relevant for both researchers and practitioners involved in technology transfer actions with use of i*.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Desarrollo de una herramienta de verificación para interoperabilidad de soluciones dirigidas por modelo

Tesis (Ingeniero Civil Informático)Este trabajo de título está orientado al desarrollo de una herramienta de verificación automática para interoperabilidad de modelos, específicamente para modelos de análisis y de diseño. Se entiende por interoperabilidad al intercambio de información entre dos o más sistemas que utilizan dicha información para realizar procesos específicos (IEEE, 1991). En el desarrollo dirigido por modelos este intercambio de información se realiza mediante el uso de modelos que son transformados para poder adaptarlos a las propuestas MDD involucradas. Para garantizar que la interoperabilidad en entornos MDD es correcta, se debe asegurar que los modelos son correctamente transformados y que pueden ser reconocidos y utilizados por las distintas tecnologías que participan. Si en el proceso de transformación, algún elemento no puede ser transformado, entonces la información que será intercambiada es incompleta y por lo tanto la interoperabilidad presentará problemas. En resumen, es fundamental tener un mecanismo de verificación para garantizar que la interoperabilidad de las soluciones MDD sea completa. Para desarrollar una solución MDD, es importante contar con lenguajes de modelado adecuados. Estos lenguajes de modelado son definidos en base a ciertas reglas, la cuales están determinadas por su metamodelo. El proceso de transformación de modelos se realiza tomando en cuenta un modelo fuente o de entrada (source model) para generar un modelo objetivo o de salida (target model) y la transformación o reglas de transformación involucran un mapping, el cual se realiza conforme a los meta modelos respectivos. En la Ilustración 2 se muestra un esquema de la transformación entre modelos