Early phases of information systems engineering include the understanding of the enterprise’s context and the construction of models at different levels of decomposition, required to design the system architecture. These time-consuming activities are usually conducted by relatively large teams, composed of groups of non-technical stakeholders playing mostly an informative role (i.e. not involved in documentation and even less in modelling), led by few experienced technical consultants performing most of the documenting and modelling effort. This paper evaluates the ability of non-technical stakeholders to create strategic dependency diagrams written with the i* language in the design of the context model of a system architecture, and find out which difficulties they may encounter and what the quality of the models they build is. A case study involving non-technical stakeholders from 11 organizational areas in an Ecuadorian university held under the supervision and coordination of the two authors acting as consultants. The non-technical stakeholders identified the majority of the dependencies that should appear in the case study’s context model, although they experienced some difficulties in declaring the type of dependency, representing such dependencies graphically and applying the description guidelines provided in the training. Managers were observed to make more mistakes than other more operational roles. From the observations of these results, a set of methodological advices were compiled for their use in future, similar endeavours. It is concluded that non-technical stakeholders can take an active role in the construction of the context model. This conclusion is relevant for both researchers and practitioners involved in technology transfer actions with use of i*.

中文翻译：

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非技术利益相关者使用 i* 的实证研究：以战略依赖图为例

信息系统工程的早期阶段包括对企业环境的理解和不同层次分解模型的构建，这是设计系统架构所必需的。这些耗时的活动通常由相对较大的团队进行，由非技术利益相关者小组组成，主要扮演信息角色（即不参与文档，更不参与建模），由少数经验丰富的技术顾问领导，执行大部分文档和建模工作。本文评估了非技术利益相关者在系统架构的上下文模型设计中创建使用 i* 语言编写的战略依赖图的能力，并找出他们可能遇到的困难以及他们构建的模型的质量是。在担任顾问的两位作者的监督和协调下，涉及厄瓜多尔大学 11 个组织领域的非技术利益相关者的案例研究。非技术利益相关者确定了应出现在案例研究的上下文模型中的大多数依赖项，尽管他们在声明依赖项类型、以图形方式表示此类依赖项以及应用培训中提供的描述指南方面遇到了一些困难。据观察，与其他更具运营性的角色相比，管理人员犯的错误更多。根据对这些结果的观察，编制了一套方法论建议，以供将来类似的努力使用。得出的结论是，非技术利益相关者可以在上下文模型的构建中发挥积极作用。