Improving traceability in agent oriented development

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

Requirements engineering has argued that in order to successfully develop complex software systems, it is necessary to support the modeling process with traceability mechanisms and tools. Requirement Traceability refers to the ability to ensure continued alignment between stakeholdersâ requirements and various outputs of the systems development process. A requirements traceability process describes and follows the life of a requirement, in both a forward and backward direction (i.e. from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through all periods of on-going refinement and iteration in any of these phases). Software traceability is performed by generating, representing, recording and maintaining traceability relations (links) between software artifacts either manually or automatically. Software developers have used agents as a way to understand, model, and develop complex systems more naturally. Multiagent systems (MAS) reflect the decentralized nature of modern distributed systems, supporting dynamic and unpredictable situations in which software is now expected to operate. Moreover, MAS are appropriate to open systems in which the constituent components and their interaction patterns constantly change. The use of agent with its greater reliance on codified knowledge, its flexibility, adaptability and autonomy, introduces new challenges for the support of requirements traceability. The capabilities of agent and the social aspect of agency should be considered. A contribution for this field is Tropos, a framework used for modeling of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). It borrows the abstractions and concepts from organizational and social disciplines to understand, model, reason, analyze and design. In doing so, Tropos provide a more flexible, higher-level set of constructs to deal with a world operating more on social principles than on mechanistic rules. The inherent flexibility, adaptability and autonomy introduced by MAS poses new challenges to current traceability approaches. We claim that a specific traceability model and process should be used to address the needs of MAS. In this thesis we propose a Traceability Metamodel to clarify the identification of the new relations required for the agent paradigm. We then define a Reference Model to capture the capabilities of agents and the social aspect of agency. A process is created in order to identify the relevant traceability information during the late requirements and architectural phases of Tropos. It captures the traceable information and constructs the matrixes that will help to understand the global goals of the agent system, the individual issues of each agent and their social aspects as well as the impact analysis when changes happen. The DBSitter-AS example will be used to illustrate how our proposal captures agent characteristics such as autonomy and cooperation

ASSUNTO(S)

rastreabilidade de requisitos agent-oriented development computation desenvolvimento orientado a agentes computaÃÃo ciencia da computacao requirements traceability

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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