User-story driven development of multi-agent systems: A process fragment for agile methods

Abstract

Agile software development methods are mostly built as a set of managerial guidelines and development concepts on how to handle a software development but are not bounded to software development paradigms like object or agent orientation. Some methods, like eXtreme Programming and SCRUM are driven by operational requirements representation models called User Stories. These User Stories can be used as an anchoring point to agile methods; this means that we could take a User Stories set to drive a software transformation approach embedded in a particular development paradigm. This paper presents a process fragment for Multi-Agent Systems development with agile methods based on User Stories sets. The process fragment indeed takes advantage of an initial set of User Stories to build a reasoning model (called the Rationale Tree; typically several of these are built for a single project) that documents decompositions and means-end alternatives in scenarios for requirements realization. A Rationale Tree can then be aligned with a Multi-Agent design and implemented in an agent-oriented development language. In this paper the transformation is targeted to the JAVA Agent DEvelopment (JADE) framework. The process fragment (at least partially) covers the Requirements Analysis, Multi-Agent System Design and Multi-Agent System Implementation phases. Transformation from one phase to the other is overseen and illustrated on an example.