Agent-oriented methodologies like ADELFE, ASPECS, INGENIAS, MaSE, PASSI, Prometheus, SODA, or Tropos propose development formulae with their own specificities. Analyzing them is the responsibility of the Process Engineering discipline, which is currently one hot research line in software engineering. The analysis makes it possible to construct a catalogue of current processes, assessing their utility and enabling their reuse. Additionally, the study may lead to the modification or improvement of existing development processes, perhaps combining fragments from solutions coming from the different methodologies.
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 Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) field.