Including business strategy in model-driven methods: an experiment

Software-centric organisations design a loosely coupled organisation structure around strategic objectives, replicating this design to their business processes and information systems. Nowadays, dealing with business strategy in a model-driven development context is a challenge since key concepts such as the organisation’s structure and strategic ends and means have been mostly addressed at the enterprise architecture level for the strategic alignment of the whole organisation, and have not been included into MDD methods as a requirements source. To overcome this issue, researchers have designed the LiteStrat, a business strategy modelling method compliant with MDD for developing information systems. This article presents an empirical comparison of LiteStrat and with i*, one of the most used models for strategic alignment in an MDD context. The article contributes with a literature review on the experimental comparison of modelling languages, the design of a study for measuring and comparing the semantic quality of modelling languages, and empirical evidence of the LiteStrat and i* differences. The evaluation consists of a 2 × 2 factorial experiment recruiting 28 undergraduate subjects. Significant differences favouring LiteStrat were found for models’ accuracy and completeness, while no differences in modeller’s efficiency and satisfaction were detected. These results yield evidence of the suitability of LiteStrat for business strategy modelling in a model-driven context.