The future of AOSE: exploiting SME for a new conception of methodologies
Mariachiara Puviani, Giacomo Cabri, Letizia Leonardi · IRIS UNIMORE (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) · 2009
In the last years, the software engineering field has provided developers with different methodologies to support their work. Nevertheless, existing methodologies can hardly meet the requirements of all existing scenarios, which are more and more complex and highly differentiated. This problem can be faced by applying the Situational Method Engineering (SME) approach, which enables to build appropriate methodologies by composing “fragments ” of existing ones. We envision this approach as the future of software engineering in general, and in particular if applied in Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). This approach has also the valuable advantage of reusing models, solutions, experiences and tools of existing and tested methodologies. In this paper we report three examples of application of the Situational Method Engineering approach in AOSE. We show that this approach can be applied following different directions, and in particular: entity-driven, metamodel-driven, and characteristic-driven. To concretely show these directions, we present three examples of methodologies for developing agent systems (one regarding self-organising systems), all constructed composing methodology fragments to meet the scenario requirements.