The i^∗ framework: The way ahead

Actors, dependencies, goal satisfaction, ..., in a word, strategic modeling and reasoning, are recurrent matters in many software engineering and information system activities and disciplines. Standing out among other initiatives, i* soon became the preferred strategic analysis framework to many research groups that have adopted it and shaped it to their particular interests. A quick look to the state of the art on information science uncovers a significant number of approaches that use i* one way or another. It is then the perfect time to reflect about the current state of the framework and to issue new opportunities that may pose renovated objectives for researchers and furthermore foster the adoption of i* beyond the scientific community. This keynote identifies some challenges to overcome in this process, with special focus on syntactical and ontological aspects of the framework, and proposes a research agenda related to the most significant of these challenges.