Requirements Engineering for Social Applications

We characterize social applications as those involving interaction among multiple autonomous agents. We are interested in the essential concepts and approaches for modeling such applications. We make the case that i* has some limitations with respect to the modeling of social applications. The problem is in the intentional nature of i*. The deeper roots though lie in the centralized machine-oriented approach of current requirements engineering approaches. We recommend an interaction-oriented approach to requirements modeling, modeling in terms of social commitments rather than dependencies, and in general, accommodating a distributed perspective right from the earliest phases of software engineering. For clarity, we also distinguish social commitments from various similar-sounding notions in the literature.