The complexity of agents, their environment, and the interaction between agents and environment suggest that experimental testing represents a major research effort in the area of multi-agent systems. However, the development of methods and tools supporting systematic experiments with agents has not found the expected attention. For testing agents, developers often resort to handcrafted solutio...

The QAOOSE 2007 workshop brought together, for half day, researchers working on several aspects related to quantitative evaluation of software artifacts developed with the object-oriented paradigm and related technologies. Ideas and experiences were shared and discussed. This report includes a summary of the technical presentations and subsequent discussions raised by them. Exceptionally this y...

N ew methodologies and better techniques are the rule in software engineering, and users of large and complex methodologies benefit greatly from specialized software support tools. However, developing such tools is both difficult and expensive, because developers must implement a lot of functionality in a short time. A promising solution is component-based software development (CBSD), in partic...

Software engineers of multi-agent systems (MASs) are faced with different concerns such as autonomy, adaptation, interaction, collaboration, learning, and mobility, which are essentially different from classical concerns addressed in object-oriented software engineering. MAS developers however have relied mostly on object-oriented design techniques and programming languages, such as Java. It of...

This chapter presents a selection of current research works on agent technology which are focused on the development of Multi-Agent Systems. The purpose of this chapter is to guide developers through existing theories, methods, and software that can be applied in each stage of a development. However, this guide is not exhaustive due the amount of agent-related research works. Thus authors have ...

Usability has become a key issue for the perceived quality of a software product. In order to attain a high level of usability in the software product we need to apply the set of techniques belonging to Usability Engineering. In most software development organizations where these techniques are applied, they are not integrated with the Software Engineering development process. Object oriented m...

This paper helps to improve the understanding of advanced object-oriented software composition techniques Advanced software composition has become the locus of attention of current research on software engineering and execution platforms. The investments in component-based software development and aspect-oriented software development are witnesses of this trend. We believe current research on a...

The best elucidations to software development problems are regularly touted as object-oriented processes. The popularity of object-oriented design metrics is essential in software engineering for measuring the software complexity, estimating size, quality and project efforts. There are various approaches through which we can find the software cost estimation and predicates on various kinds of d...

In software engineering and development, we are expected to utilize the technique of abstraction. Yet, it is one of the most confounding topics. In this paper we explore the concept of abstraction as applied to software engineering, define and discuss a conceptual metric called levels-ofabstraction, LOA, and show some attributes of LOA. Keyword: software, abstraction, measurement

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a relatively new software development paradigm to improve systematic software reuse. There are two key assets underpin the software product line (SPL) development: a feature model and a reference architecture. To deal with complex crosscutting behaviours in SPLs and also manage the impact of nonfunctional requirements (NFRs), we propose an aspect-orie...