Professor John Mylopoulos

University of Toronto, Canada

Agent-Oriented Information System Development

Traditionally, software development techniques for information systems have been process- and data-driven in the sense that the fundamental concepts used to define and analyse software during requirements analysis and design have been those of "process" and "data". This observation applies equally well to structured as well as object-oriented analysis and design techniques.

We speculate on what a software development methodology might look like if it was founded on the notions of "actor" (who can be an agent, a position, or a role) and "goal". For our study we adopt Eric Yu's i* modelling framework and show how one can model and analyse early and late requirements, architectural and detailed design. The proposed methodology fits well current work on agent-oriented programming frameworks.