Abstract

Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) paradigm represents an interesting means of analyzing, designing and building complex software systems quite suitable to new software development requirements. Many scientific researches have been focused on this paradigm, yet its current state still reports relative lack of industrial acceptance compared to others. As a survey of AOSE paradigm, this paper outlines the overall state of this paradigm; and by identifying its weaknesses in detail, leads to a proposal solution to such shortcoming. This solution, in keeping with the existing approaches that aim to use situational method engineering (SME) in collaborative manner between agent-oriented methodology designers, suggests the use of a methodology evaluation framework in the process as well. This framework is a means to collect the best method fragment and evaluate consecutively the methodology during the development process for possible methodology improvements. The proposed solution is then readjusted to help software development organizations to reach the fifth level of capability maturity model (CMM).

Key words: Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE), capability maturity model (CMM), evaluation framework, methodology, project-specific, situational method engineering (SME).