Discussing strategies for software and designing from an Agent-oriented point of view

Software design is a complex problem-solving process which requires to evaluate several design options while pursuing the objective of adhering to general principles of good quality. For instance, designing open, robust and secure architectures for novel application areas, calls for evaluating and/or integrating different distributed system technologies, such as peer-to-peer and multi-agent systems. This paper proposes a discussion on software architecting and designing strategies adopting an agent-oriented approach. Several works face this issue proposing methodologies based mainly on the use of architectural styles. Here we consider general strategies useful in the design process, such as divide-and-conquer, and principles for a good design, such as cohesion and decoupling, and argue that, performing goal analysis, according to \emph{Tropos}, an agent-oriented methodology, provides methods for applying them. A case study in the domain of decision-support systems in agriculture is used to illustrate