Towards an Agent Oriented approach to Software Engineering

Agent-oriented software development is gaining popularity over traditional software development techniques, including structured and object-oriented ones oriented software engineering. Several approaches have been proposed, ranging from informal methodologies, to formal ones, most of them focusing basically on architectural design. We are defining a software development methodology, called Tropos, which will allow us to exploit all the flexibility provided by agent oriented programming. The two novel features of Tropos are: first, that of using the notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions in all phases of software development, from the early analysis down to the actual implementation; second, that of covering also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents