Towards an Agent Oriented Approach to Software Engineering

This paper describes a methodology for agent oriented software engineering, called Tropos1. Tropos is based on three key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions (for instance: goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from the early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers 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. Third, Tropos adopts a transformational approach to process artifacts refinement. The methodology is partially illustrated with the help of a case study.