Agent software engineering; Agile development; User story; Multi-agent system; Process fragment; Rationale tree; JAVA Agent DEvelopment framework; JADE; i ∗ -based software process modeling
Abstract :
[en] Agile software development methods are mostly built as a set of managerial guidelines and development concepts on how to handle a software development but are not bounded to software development paradigms like object or agent orientation. Some methods, like eXtreme Programming and SCRUM are driven by operational requirements representation models called User Stories. These User Stories can be used as an anchoring point to agile methods; this means that we could take a User Stories set to drive a software transformation approach embedded in a particular development paradigm. This paper presents a process fragment for Multi-Agent Systems development with agile methods based on User Stories sets. The process fragment indeed takes advantage of an initial set of User Stories to build a reasoning model (called the Rationale Tree; typically several of these are built for a single project) that documents decompositions and means-end alternatives in scenarios for requirements realization. A Rationale Tree can then be aligned with a Multi-Agent design and implemented in an agent-oriented development language. In this paper the transformation is targeted to the JAVA Agent DEvelopment (JADE) framework. The process fragment (at least partially) covers the Requirements Analysis, Multi-Agent System Design and Multi-Agent System Implementation phases. Transformation from one phase to the other is overseen and illustrated on an example.
Disciplines :
Computer science Management information systems
Author, co-author :
Wautelet, Yves
Heng, Samedi ; Université de Liège - ULiège > HEC Liège : UER > Digital Business
Kiv, Soreangsey
Kolp, Manuel
Language :
English
Title :
User-story driven development of multi-agent systems: A process fragment for agile methods
Vlaanderen, K., Jansen, S., Brinkkemper, S., Jaspers, E., The agile requirements refinery: applying scrum principles to software product management. Inf Softw Technol 53:1 (2011), 58–70, 10.1016/j.infsof.2010.08.004.
Cohn, M., Succeeding with agile: software development using scrum, 1st, 2009, Addison-Wesley Professional.
da Silva, A.R., Model-driven engineering: a survey supported by the unified conceptual model. Comput Lang Syst Struct 43 (2015), 139–155, 10.1016/j.cl.2015.06.001.
Seidita, V., Cossentino, M., Chella, A., A proposal of process fragment definition and documentation. Cossentino, M., Kaisers, M., Tuyls, K., Weiss, G., (eds.) 9th european workshop on multi-agent systems - EUMAS 2011 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 7541, 2011, Springer, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 221–237 Revised Selected Papers.
Yu, E., Giorgini, P., Maiden, N., Mylopoulos, J., Social modeling for requirements engineering, 2011, MIT Press.
Yu, E.S.K., Social modeling and i*. Conceptual modeling: foundations and applications - essays in honor of John Mylopoulos, vol. 5600, 2009, Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI, Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 99–121.
Yu, E.S.K., Towards modeling and reasoning support for early-phase requirements engineering. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international symposium on requirements engineering (RE’97), 1997, IEEE Computer Society, Annapolis, MD, USA, 226–235.
Wautelet, Y., Heng, S., Kolp, M., Mirbel, I., Unifying and extending user story models. Jarke, M., Mylopoulos, J., Quix, C., Rolland, C., Manolopoulos, Y., Mouratidis, H., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of CAISE 2014 LNCS, vol. 8484, 2014, Springer, Thessaloniki, Greece, 211–225.
Bellifemine, F., Caire, G., Greenwood, D., Developing multi-agent systems with JADE, vol. 5, 2007, Wiley.
Lucassen, G., Dalpiaz, F., van der Werf, J.M.E.M., Brinkkemper, S., The use and effectiveness of user stories in practice. Daneva, M., Pastor, O., (eds.) Proceedings of 22nd international working conference on requirements engineering: foundation for software quality - REFSQ 2016 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 9619, 2016, Springer, Gothenburg, Sweden, 205–222.
Van Lamsweerde, A., Requirements engineering: from system goals to UML models to software specifications, 2009, Wiley.
OMG, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). version 2.0.1. Technical Report, 2013, Object Management Group.
Glinz M. A glossary of requirements engineering terminology, International Requirements Engineering Board, version 1.4; 2012.
van Lamsweerde, A., Goal-oriented requirements engineering: a roundtrip from research to practice. Proceedings of the 12th IEEE international conference on requirements engineering (RE 2004), 2004, IEEE Computer Society, Kyoto, Japan, 4–7, 10.1109/RE.2004.25 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/RE.2004.25.
Liskin, O., Pham, R., Kiesling, S., Schneider, K., Why we need a granularity concept for user stories. Cantone, G., Marchesi, M., (eds.) Proceedings of the 15th international conference on agile processes in software engineering and extreme programming - XP 2014 LNBIP, vol. 179, 2014, Springer, Rome, Italy, 110–125.
Wautelet, Y., Heng, S., Kolp, M., Mirbel, I., Poelmans, S., Building a rationale diagram for evaluating user story sets. Proceedings of the 10th IEEE international conference on research challenges in information science, RCIS 2016, 2016, IEEE, Grenoble, France, 1–12, 10.1109/RCIS.2016.7549299.
Simon, H.A., The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.), 1996, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Anonymous, Software & systems process engineering meta-model specification. version 2.0. Techical Report, 2008, Object Management Group.
Faulkner, S., Kolp, M., Wautelet, Y., Achbany, Y., A formal description language for multi-agent architectures. Kolp, M., Henderson-Sellers, B., Mouratidis, H., Garcia, A., Ghose, A., Bresciani, P., (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th international bi-conference workshop on agent-oriented information systems IV, AOIS 2006 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4898, 2006, Springer, Hakodate, Japan, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 143–163 Revised Selected Papers.
Kolp, M., Faulkner, S., Wautelet, Y., Social structure based design patterns for agent-oriented software engineering. Int J Intell Inf Technol 4:2 (2008), 1–23, 10.4018/jiit.2008040101.
Paetsch, F., Eberlein, A., Maurer, F., Requirements engineering and agile software development. Proceedings of the 12th IEEE international workshops on enabling technologies infrastructure for collaborative enterprises (WETICE) 2003), 2003, IEEE Computer Society, Linz, Austria, 308–313.
Chung, L., do Prado Leite, J.C.S., On non-functional requirements in software engineering. Conceptual modeling: foundations and applications - essays in honor of John Mylopoulos, vol. 5600, 2009, Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI, Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 363–379.
M. Kolp and Y. Wautelet, DesCARTES Architect: Design CASE Tool for Agent-Oriented Repositories, Techniques, Environments and Systems. Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, 2016. URL http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/descartes/.
Shergill, M.P.K., Scharff, C., Developing multi-channel mobile solutions for a global audience: the case of a smarter energy solution. SARNOFF’12, 2012, New Jersey.
Scharff, C., Heng, S., Kulkarni, V., On the difficulties for students to adhere to scrum on global software development projects: preliminary results. Faulk, S.R., Weiss, D.M., Young, M., Yu, L., (eds.) Proceedings of the Second international workshop on collaborative teaching of globally distributed software development, CTGDSD 2012, 2012, IEEE, Zurich, Switzerland, 25–29, 10.1109/CTGDSD.2012.6226946.
Wautelet, Y., Kolp, M., Business and model-driven development of BDI multi-agent systems. Neurocomputing 182 (2016), 304–321, 10.1016/j.neucom.2015.12.022.
Challenger, M., Mernik, M., Kardas, G., Kosar, T., Declarative specifications for the development of multi-agent systems. Comput Stand Interfaces 43 (2016), 91–115, 10.1016/j.csi.2015.08.012.
Hahn, C., Madrigal-Mora, C., Fischer, K., A platform-independent metamodel for multiagent systems. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 18:2 (2009), 239–266, 10.1007/s10458-008-9042-0.
Winikoff, M., Jacktm intelligent agents: an industrial strength platform. Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Fallah-Seghrouchni, A.E., (eds.) Multi-agent programming: languages, platforms and applications Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, vol. 15, 2005, Springer, 175–193.
Wautelet, Y., Heng, S., Kolp, M., Scharff, C., Towards an agent-driven software architecture aligned with user stories. van den Herik, H.J., Filipe, J., (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th international conference on agents and artificial intelligence (ICAART 2016), vol. 2, 2016, SciTePress, Rome, Italy, 337–345, 10.5220/0005706103370345.
Challenger, M., Demirkol, S., Getir, S., Mernik, M., Kardas, G., Kosar, T., On the use of a domain-specific modeling language in the development of multiagent systems. Eng Appl AI 28 (2014), 111–141, 10.1016/j.engappai.2013.11.012.
Getir, S., Challenger, M., Kardas, G., The formal semantics of a domain-specific modeling language for semantic web enabled multi-agent systems. Int J Coop Inf Syst, 23(3), 2014, 1450005, 10.1142/S0218843014500051.
García-Magariño, I., Towards the integration of the agent-oriented modeling diversity with a powertype-based language. Comput Stand Interfaces 36:6 (2014), 941–952, 10.1016/j.csi.2014.02.002.
Gonçalves, E.J.T., Cortés, M.I., de Campos, G.A.L., Lopes, Y.S., Freire, E.S.S., da Silva, V.T., et al. MAS-ML 2.0: Supporting the modelling of multi-agent systems with different agent architectures. J Syst Softw 108 (2015), 77–109, 10.1016/j.jss.2015.06.008.
Chella, A., Cossentino, M., Sabatucci, L., Seidita, V., Agile passi: an agile process for designing agents. Int J Comput Syst Sci Eng 21:2 (2006), 133–144.
DeLoach, S.A., Matson, E.T., Li, Y., Applying agent oriented software engineering to cooperative robotics. Proceedings of FLAIRS conference, 2002, 391–396.
Wood, M.F., DeLoach, S.A., An overview of the multiagent systems engineering methodology. Agent-oriented software engineering, 2001, Springer, 207–221.
Gaur, V., Soni, A., A novel approach to explore inter agent dependencies from user requirements. Proc Technol 1 (2012), 412–419.
Tenso, T., Taveter, K., Requirements engineering with agent-oriented models. Proceedings of Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering ENASE, 2013, 254–259.
Carrera, Á., Iglesias, C.A., Garijo, M., Beast methodology: an agile testing methodology for multi-agent systems based on behaviour driven development. Info Syst Front 16:2 (2014), 169–182.
Gascueña, J.M., Fernández-Caballero, A., Prometheus and INGENIAS agent methodologies: a complementary approach. Luck, M., Gómez-Sanz, J.J., (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on agent-oriented software engineering IX, AOSE 2008 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5386, 2008, Springer, Estoril, Portugal, 131–144 Revised Selected Papers.
Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., Mylopoulos, J., Tropos: an agent-oriented software development methodology. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 8:3 (2004), 203–236.
Castro, J., Kolp, M., Mylopoulos, J., Towards requirements-driven information systems engineering: the Tropos project. Inf Syst 27:6 (2002), 365–389.
Lucassen, G., Dalpiaz, F., van der Werf, J.M.E.M., Brinkkemper, S., AQUSA: the automatic quality user story artisan for agile software development. Joint proceedings of workshops, doctoral symposium, research method track, and poster track co-located with the 22nd international conference on requirements engineering: foundation for software quality (REFSQ 2016), 2016, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Velghe, M., Requirements engineering in agile methods: contributions on user story models, 2015, KU Leuven, Belgium Master's thesis Url: http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/descartes/ThesisMattijs.pdf.
Patton, J., Economy, P., User story mapping: discover the whole story, build the right product, 1st, 2014, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Wautelet, Y., Heng, S., Hintea, D., Kolp, M., Poelmans, S., Bridging user story sets with the use case model. Link, S., Trujillo, J., (eds.) Proceedings of Workshops in Advances in Conceptual Modeling - ER 2016, AHA, MoBiD, MORE-BI, MReBA, QMMQ, SCME, and WM2SP Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 9975, 2016, Gifu, Japan, 127–138.