Full Lifecycle Methodologies for Agent-Oriented Systems - The Extended Open Process Framework
John K. Debenham, Brian Henderson‐Sellers · OPUS - Open Publications of UTS Scholars (University of Technology Sydney) · 2002
The OPEN Process Framework (OPF) is a componentized 00 development methodology underpinned by a full metamodel.Instances of each element of the metarnodel are stored in a repository.Individual selections are then made in order to create a personalized process for software development.Originally a development methodology targetted at object technology, the OPF has been recently extended to support agent-oriented information systems.Here, we describe that extension by means of an extended case study.We find that although much work has to be done to deal with 'autonomous' components, the scope of the OPEN Process Framework is adequate to absorb this new work.Furthermore, there has been no need to perturb the existing Framework in accommodating these new ideas. Agent-oriented and Object-oriented MethodologiesAgents are beginning to enter the mainstream of software engineering [I], emerging from the research laboratory into commercial utilization.While intelligent agents have emerged from artificial intelligence research [2], agent-oriented methodologies have a closer relationship to object technology and to object-oriented methodologies.Current methodology research [3-5] is focussed on different ways to capitalize on this synergistic merger between knowledge engineering techniques [6] and object technology for the full Iifecycle methodological support for the development of object-oriented information systems.This synergy is underpinned by the recent proposals in [7] for extensions to the OMG's Unified Modeling Language [8,9] in order that that modelling language may be considered applicable for agent modelling.While the Gaia methodology [4] focusses on the design aspects, the extensions made to the OPEN methodological approach (10,11] focusses on full lifecycle issues by underpinning the methodology with a componentized metamodel.In this paper, we take the proposals made in [5] and scrutinize them in a detailed case study environment.