Information systems development through social structures

ABSTRACT

Information systems for organizations such as e-business and knowledge management systems must continually evolve to adapt to their operational environment. Unfortunately, current development methodologies do not support system evolution well, making software an obstacle to organizational changes. The paper describes a framework that develops and evolves seamlessly a system-to-be within its organizational environment. We adopt a set of social structures --- organizational styles and social patterns --- based on concepts of organization theory and agent approaches, as a foundation to model early and late requirements as well as architectural and detailed design. We illustrate the use of the social structures through a case study, and we specify one of the styles in Formal Tropos language. This research has been conducted within the context of the Tropos project.

REFERENCES

• 1: Annie I. Anton, Goal-Based Requirements Analysis, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Requirements Engineering (ICRE '96), p.136, April 15-18, 1996
• 2: Yariv Aridor , Danny B. Lange, Agent design patterns: elements of agent application design, Proceedings of the second international conference on Autonomous agents, p.108-115, May 10-13, 1998, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States [doi>10.1145/280765.280784]
• 3: Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh , Ivar Jacobson, The Unified Modeling Language user guide, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 1999
• 4: J. A. Bubenko, "Next Generation Information Systems: an Organizational Perspective", In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Development of Intelligent Information Systems, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, pp. 22-31, Canada, April 1991.
• 5: Jaelson Castro , Manuel Kolp , John Mylopoulos, A Requirements-Driven Development Methodology, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, p.108-123, June 04-08, 2001
• 6: L. K. Chung, B. A. Nixon, E. Yu and J. Mylopoulos. Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering, Kluwer Publishing, 2000.
• 7: Anne Dardenne , Axel van Lamsweerde , Stephen Fickas, Goal-directed requirements acquisition, Science of Computer Programming, v.20 n.1-2, p.3-50, April 1993
• 8: Ariel Fuxman , Paolo Giorgini , Manuel Kolp , John Mylopoulos, Information systems as social structures, Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, p.10-21, October 17-19, 2001, Ogunquit, Maine, USA [doi>10.1145/505168.505171]
• 9: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 10: P. Giorgini, A. Perini, J. Mylopoulos, F. Giunchiglia and P. Bresciani. "Agent-Oriented Software Development: A Case Study". In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering (SEKE01), Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2001.
• 11: B. Gomes-Casseres. The alliance revolution: the new shape of business rivalry, Harvard University Press, 1996.
• 12: S. Hayden, C. Carrick, and Q. Yang. "Architectural Design Patterns for Multiagent Coordination". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'99), Seattle, USA, May 1999.
• 13: Manuel Kolp , Paolo Giorgini , John Mylopoulos, A Goal-Based Organizational Perspective on Multi-agent Architectures, Revised Papers from the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents VIII, p.128-140, August 01-03, 2001
• 14: H. Mintzberg, Structure in fives: designing effective organizations. Prentice-Hall, 1992.
• 15: J. Odell, H. Van Dyke Parunak, and B. Bauer, "Extending UML for Agents", In Proceedings of the Agent-Oriented Information System Workshop at the 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3-17, Austin, USA, July 2000.
• 16: S. Parsons, "Some qualitative approaches to applying the Dempster-Shafer theory". In Information and Decision technologies, 19 (1994), pp 321- 337.
• 17: W. Richard Scott. Organizations: rational, natural, and open systems, Prentice Hall, 1998.
• 18: Mary Shaw , David Garlan, Software architecture: perspectives on an emerging discipline, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996
• 19: L. Segil. Intelligent business alliances: how to profit using today's most important strategic tool, Times Business, 1996,
• 20: Rebecca Wirfs-Brock , Brian Wilkerson , Lauren Wiener, Designing object-oriented software, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1990
• 21: M. Y. Yoshino, and U. S. Rangan, Strategic Alliances: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Globalization, Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
• 22: Eric Siu-Kwong Yu, Modelling strategic relationships for process reengineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada, 1996

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management
          Subjects: Systems analysis and design
      K.6.3 Software Management
          Subjects: Software development

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Management

Keywords:
i* framework, tropos methodology, requirements engineering