A method for the definition of metrics over i* models

Abstract

The i* framework has been widely adopted by the information systems community for goal- and agent-oriented modeling and analysis. One of its potential benefits is the assessment of the properties of the modeled sociotechnical system. In this respect, the definition and evaluation of metrics may play a fundamental role. We are interested in porting to the i* framework metrics that have been already defined and validated in other domains. After some experimentation with i* metrics in this context, the complexity inherent to their definition has driven us to build a method for defining them. In this paper, we present the resulting method, iMDFM, which is structured into 4 steps: domain analysis, domain metrics analysis, metrics formulation and framework update. We apply our approach to an existing suite of metrics for measuring business processes performance and drive some observations from this experiment.