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MDA-based initiatives for software development have included computation-independent models to align information system models with business knowledge which is important in the development process. One source of business knowledge is the business strategy, which, traditionally, has had a long-term perspective; changes in the organisational structure and their high-level ends and means were less frequent and arguably not relevant for software development. However, organisations that aim to accelerate their software development cycles define their business strategy and reconfigure their structure on a short-term, continuous basis, fusing, splitting and creating as independent as possible organisation units. These changes directly affect the business processes and the design of software components of the organisation. Based on this approach to business strategy, we propose Stra2Bis, a method for designing strategically aligned business processes in an MDA-based context. Stra2Bis proposes a business strategy modelling step when redesigning business processes and three transformation guidelines to support the analysis of the alignment of processes with the organisational structure and the measurement of the units’ outcomes. We discussed the effect of the guidelines on the software design with five professionals who supported the proposal’s feasibility and usefulness.

Context. Agile organisations continuously change their business strategy with an adaptive, outside-in perspective to align their goals, structure, and supporting information systems. Conceptual modelling for strategy and systems alignment has been tackled by enterprise architecture and goal modelling frameworks, however, these approaches require expensive modelling efforts and lack precise modelling procedures that hinder its use in agile, model-driven software development processes. Objective.We present LiteStrat, a lightweight modelling language and procedure for business strategy. Method. LiteStrat was designed by assembling concepts from existing enterprise architecture and goal frameworks. An experimental evaluation is presented to explore improvements over a reference goal modelling framework. Results Significant accuracy improvements for representing business strategy concepts were found, without affecting complexity, efficiency, and subjects’ satisfaction. Conclusions.The adaptive, domain-accurate, and lightweight approach of LiteStrat to model business strategy serve as a basis for its integration with business process and system models in an MDD context.

Context. Business strategy and intentional factors that drive the information systems development and evolution have been addressed by several conceptual modelling initiatives, mostly from goal modelling and enterprise architecture domains. As agility scales to top executive levels, business strategy becomes adaptive, frequently and objectively assessed, while shapes the structure of the organisation around business capabilities. Problem. On the one hand, modelling several business layer views with EA frameworks to represent business strategy could be a challenging effort under a constantly changing environment. On the other hand, using more lightweight but flexible goal modelling frameworks could hinder the aim of getting well-bounded and repeatable business strategy models. Objective. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of connecting well-defined business strategy models using i* and, by exploiting existing modelling methods and transformation techniques, connect them with business process and information system models, to finally generate the working code of the software product. Contribution. We present an initial approach of a modelling procedure to capture business strategy using i* under an adaptive, agile approach, and show a practical integration with a software production method from requirements to code.