Processes Engineering & AOSE

One of the most stimulating research lines in software engineering today, process engineering is currently a hot topic in agentoriented software engineering research [1–4]. A number of methodologies have been designed such as ADELFE, ASPECS, INGENIAS, MaSE, PASSI, Prometheus, SODA, Tropos,. . . , each of which with their own specificities. Sometimes, when a multi-agent application has to be designed, the methodology chosen does not completely fit for the whole development process. The current proposed approach is to take benefits to all existing methodologies and to reuse during the development process those parts that are the most relevant in order to build a new process engineering. There, process engineering aims at building libraries of suitable methods from/for agent oriented methodologies, thus helping in cataloguing current processes, assessing their utility, and rebuilding them according to developer needs. In this paper, we first provide a general view over the area of Software Process Engineering (SPE), then focus on the most recent developments of SPE in the AOSE field.