Fostering the adoption of i* by practitioners: some challenges and research directions

Abstract

The i* framework is a widespread formalism in the software engineering discipline that allows expressing intentionality of system actors. From the time it was issued, in the mid-nineties, a growing research community has adopted it either in its standard form or formulating variations in order to adapt it to some particular purpose. New methods, techniques and tools have made evolve the framework in a way that it may be currently considered quite mature from the scientific perspective. However, the i* framework has not been transferred to practitioners at the same extent yet: industrial experiences using i* are not many and have been mainly conducted by i* experts that are part of that very research community. Therefore, it may be argued that some steps are needed for boosting the adoption of i* by practitioners. In this chapter, we identify some scientific challenges whose overcoming could represent a step towards this goal. For each challenge, we present the problem that is addressed, its current state of the art and some envisaged lines of research.