Conceptual Modeling Extraveganza

Three papers concerned with conceptual modeling:

First off is Ross' seminal 1977 paper Structured Analysis (SA): A Language for Communicating Ideas. I don't think there's much I can say about this paper that hasn't been said already, so I'll keep it short. This paper presents the argument that "SA is the best thing since sliced bread", and continues to illustrate this point they present pretty much the entire meta-model for SA, and go though, in great detail, all the primitive constructs in the SA vocabulary.

Prof. Mylopoulos wrote an interesting opinion article Desert Island Column: A Trip to Carthea praising the previous paper's insight. One thing that Prof. Mylopoulos brings up is that "the world consists of more than things and happenings", which seems to be something that Ross argues strongly against in his paper. One of the cornerstones to the Ross paper was that anything worth talking about consists of 6 or fewer things and happenings.

Lastly, I took a look at Jennifer's paper Reflective Analysis of the syntax and Semantics of the i* Framework. Now, to be honest, I would have gotten a lot more out of this if I was more familiar with the i* syntax, but the idea of reflective analysis that this paper presents could be applied to any modeling tool. A study conducted by Horkoff et al looked at assignments and research papers in the community, and recorded the most frequent deviations from the U of T i* syntax, and proposed that these deviations were made due to non-optimal design choices in the languages syntax.
A couple of useful results came out of this investigation. First, the authors propose modifications to the i* syntax to address these common mistakes, and some conclusions are drawn about how users are learning i* (ie. not enough focus on areas where syntax mistakes occur). I wonder if a similar study has been done for SA or UML, and if so what their conclusions were (ie. UML activity diagrams are never used?)

Also, I was surprised to hear so many positive opinions about SADT. In my undergrad, it was touched on briefly in a Requirements Engineering class as something that was 'old, and not used by anyone anymore'.