There has been a growing interest in the role of theory within Software Engineering (SE) research. For several decades, researchers within the SE research community have argued that, to become a ‘real’ engineering science, SE needs to develop stronger theoretical foundations. However, so far, the role of theory is neither fully appreciated nor well understood in SE research. Without a good comm...

Software developers continue to face considerable challenges designing, implementing, and maintaining software systems despite steady advances in software engineering (SE). The software engineering literature contains numerous tool designs that aim to help developers perform complex information-intensive tasks. Regardless of the particular problems these tools aim to solve, they often address f...

Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building complex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date, there have been few serious attempts to cast agent systems as a software engineering paradigm. This pa...

classes Following object-oriented principles, a class that cannot be instantiated is said to be abstract. Abstract classes are often used for grouping together the common elements of a set of specialized classes. Example: Payment Cash Payment Credit Card Payment Check Payment amount: int The name in italics indicates an abstract class.

to object-oriented systems, better able to address the new demands on software. In multi-agent systems, heterogeneous agents goals. In addition to being a technological building block, an agent, also known as an actor, is an important modeling abstraction that can be used at different stages of software engineering. The authors while teaching agent-related subjects and interacting with industry...

This paper introduces a formal conceptual framework for software development, based on a problem-oriented perspective that stretches from requirements engineering through to program code. In a software problem the goal is to develop a machine—that is, a computer executing the software to be developed—that will ensure satisfaction of the requirement in the problem world. We regard development st...

Considering the great number of agent-oriented methodologies that can be found in literature, and the fact that each one defines its own concepts and system structure, one of the main challenges in AgentOriented Software Engineering research is how to make these methodologies interoperable. By defining in a non ambiguous way concepts used in a specific domain, meta-modelling may represent a ste...

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...