A modularization proposal for goal-oriented analysis of data warehouses using I-star

Abstract

The success rate of Data Warehouse (DW) development is improved by performing a requirements elicitation stage in which the users’ needs to be fulfilled by the DW are modeled. Currently, among the different proposals for modeling requirements, there is a special focus on Goal-Oriented models, and in particular on the i* framework. In order to adapt this framework for DW development, a UML profile for DWs was proposed. However, as the general i* framework, the proposal lacks modularity. This has a specially negative impact for DW development, since the business strategy plans tend to include a huge number of elements with many crossed relationships between them. In turn, the readability of the models is decreased, harming their utility and increasing the error rates and development time. In this paper, we propose an extension of the i* profile for DWs considering the modularization of goals. We also provide a set of guidelines in order to correctly apply our proposal. Furthermore, we have performed an experiment in order to validate our proposal. The great benefits of our proposal are an increase in the modularity and scalability of the models which, in turn, increases the error correction capability, and makes complex models easier to understand by both DW developers and non expert users.