Mapping Activity Theory Diagrams into i* Organizational Models

Abstract

Modern requirement engineering approaches divide the elicitation process in two different stages: one focused on analyzing the context where the system-to-be will be used and another centered on designing software solutions appropriated to the context modeled. An adequate framework for assisting context analysis is offered by the Activity Theory, a philosophic and interdisciplinary structure to study different forms of human practice that adopts the activity as the basic unit of analysis. However, there are still no methods for integrating context analysis based on Activity Theory and traditional requirement specifications techniques. In a previous work, the authors presented a requirement engineering process that integrates ethnographic analysis based on Activity Theory with requirement specification techniques based on organizational modelling. In this work we present an evolution of the process proposed by including a set of mapping guidelines to systematically transform Activity Theory diagrams into i* based organizational models. Moreover, we apply the guidelines in the development of a virtual project based learning environment.