Improving the Quality of Agent-Based Systems: Integration of Requirements Modeling into Gaia

Nowadays, there is growing interest in the agent-oriented paradigm to deal with the construction of modern and complex software systems. However, most of the current agent-oriented development methodologies focus mainly on the design and implementation phases and do not appropriately cover the requirements phase. As poor requirements engineering is recognized as the root of most errors in current software systems, and as a means for improving the quality of these systems, the objective of our work is to propose a specific requirements modeling phase to extend Gaia, one of the most recognized agent-oriented methodologies. The proposal includes the adoption of techniques from goal-oriented and functional-oriented approaches for the modeling of requirements, according to the abstractions of agent-based systems. We describe how these complementary proposed techniques contribute to the models provided by Gaia in its analysis and design phase establishing a clear traceability framework. Finally, a case study outlines the feasibility of our approach.