Towards Process Standardization for Requirements Analysis of Agent-Based Systems
Khaled Slhoub, Marco Carvalho · Advances in Science Technology and Engineering Systems Journal · 2018
QualityThe development of agent-based systems is negatively impacted by the lack of process standardization across the major development phases, such as the requirements analysis phase.This issue creates a key barrier for agent technology stockholders regarding comprehending and analyzing complexity associated with these systems specifications.Instead, such fundamental low-level infrastructure is loosely attended to in an ad-hoc fashion, and important aspects of requirements analysis are often neglected altogether.The IEEE Std 830 model is a recommended practice aimed at describing how to write better quality requirement specifications of conventional software.Knowing that agent-based computing is a natural and logical evolution of the conventional approaches to software development, we believe that the requirements phase in agent-based systems can benefit from applying the IEEE Std 830 model which results in high-quality and more accepted artifacts.This article provides a criteriabased evaluation that is derived from the software engineering body of knowledge guide to assessing the adoption degree of agent-oriented methodologies to software requirements standards.Then, it proposes a model-driven approach to restructuring and extending the IEEE Std 830-2009 standard model to specify requirements of agent-based systems.To evaluate the applicability and usefulness of the updated model, we design a research study that allows practicing the model with simple real-world problem scenarios and conducting a summative survey to solicit feedback on the model usages.