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ChaptEr 8

AGENT-ORIENTED METHODS
AND METHOD ENGINEERING

brian hEndErson-sEllErs

Abstract: Agent-oriented (AO) methodologies vary in style and, particularly, in heritage and often
with a specific focus (either in terms of domain, application style, or life-cycle coverage). For
industry adoption it is essential that full life-cycle coverage is achieved in a “standardized” way.
One way of achieving some degree of standardization yet maintaining full flexibility is through
the application of situational method engineering to the creation of agent-oriented methodolo-
gies. With this approach, method fragments are created and stored in a repository. Whenever a
methodology is needed, a subset of these is then selected from the repository and a project-specific
(or sometimes organization-specific) AO methodology is constructed. Here, we demonstrate how
this might work by using the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) approach.

Keywords: Agents, Situational Method Engineering, Software Engineering, OPEN Process Frame-
work (OPF), Methodologies

INTRODUCTION
1
To support the development of agent-oriented (AO) software systems, an appropriate method(ology)
is needed. Of the many AO methodologies in existence today, many show influences from earlier
object-oriented methodological approaches and methodological thinking.
In this chapter, we describe briefly a number of contemporary AO methodological approaches
and examine their evolution from and their relationship to earlier object-oriented (OO) method-
ologies. We then introduce the suggestion that a better approach than attempting to create a “one-
size-fits-all” AO methodology is based on the ideas of situational method engineering (SME) and
then illustrate this proposal with a brief case study.
It should be noted in passing that, while in most cases the meaning of “AO” in the term
“agent-oriented methodology” means a methodology to be used for building agent-oriented
software systems, some authors (e.g., Bresciani et al., 2004) use the term to mean that agent-
related concepts are used in the conceptual underpinning of the methodology itself. Furthermore,
although we use the term “methodology” in this chapter to mean a full description of process,
people, social structures, project management, modeling language, products, and so on (e.g.,
Henderson-Sellers, 1995; Rolland and Prakash, 1996), some of the (so-called) methodologies
referred to here provide only partial support—perhaps only in terms of addressing analysis and
design (as does Gaia—e.g., Wooldridge, Jennings, and Kinny, 2000) or omitting any discussion
of the “people element,” for instance, MaSE (DeLoach, 1999) or AOR (Wagner, 2004), the latter
being primarily a modeling language.
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