Towards a More Semantically Transparent i* Visual Syntax

Abstract

Abstract. [Context and motivation] i* is one of the most popular modelling languages in Requirements Engineering. i* models are meant to support communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders about the goals of the future system. Recent research has established that the effectiveness of modelmediated communication heavily depends on the visual syntax of the modelling language. A number of flaws in the visual syntax of i* have been uncovered and possible improvements have been suggested. [Question/problem] Producing effective visual notations is a complex task that requires taking into account various interacting quality criteria. In this paper, we focus on one of those criteria: Semantic Transparency, that is, the ability of notation symbols to suggest their meaning. [Principal ideas/results] Complementarily to previous research, we take an empirical approach. We give a preview of a series of experiments designed to identify a new symbol set for i* and to evaluate its semantic transparency.[Contribution] The reported work is an important milestone on the path towards cognitively effective requirements modelling notations. Although it does not solve all the problems in the i* notation, it illustrates the usefulness of an empirical approach to visual syntax definition. This approach can later be transposed to other quality criteria and other notations.

An Experimental Study on the Design and Modeling of Security Concepts in Business Processes

“…the symbol which is most frequently used by people to depict a concept [16]. The resulting set of stereotypes then constitutes our first proposed set of hand-sketched symbols for visualizing security concepts.…”

“…The resulting set of stereotypes then constitutes our first proposed set of hand-sketched symbols for visualizing security concepts. However, as mentioned in [16], the drawing that is the most frequently produced to denote a security concept is not necessarily expressing the idea of the respective concept best. Thus, we subsequently evaluated the set of stereotypes via expert interviews (see Section 6).…”

“…Thus, we subsequently evaluated the set of stereotypes via expert interviews (see Section 6). In accordance with [16], we applied a judges' ranking method in Experiment 2 to identify the stereotypes. We started by categorizing the drawings obtained from Experiment 1.…”

“…To answer research question RQ2, Experiment 2 is concerned with producing stereotypical symbols out of the sketches of Experiment 1 (adapted from [16]). …”

“…This study aims at designing symbols that are semantics-oriented and user-oriented (see Section 2) as outlined in [15]. Based on the suggestions and findings presented in [13,16,17], we designed two studies to obtain graphical symbols for 11 security concepts. Subsequently, we evaluated the symbol set via expert interviews.…”