A Social Framework for Software Architectural Design

Abstract

Information systems are deeply linked to human activities. Unfortunately, development methodologies have been traditionally inspired by programming concepts and not by organizational and enterprise ones. This leads to ontological and semantic gaps between the systems and their environments. The adoption of Multi- Agent Systems (MAS) helps to reduce these gaps by offering modeling tools based on organizational concepts (actors, agents, goals, objectives, responsibilities, social dependencies, etc.) as fundamentals to conceive systems through a development process. Socio-technical design is concerned with the direct involvement of users in software design. To this respect the DesCARTES framework presented in this paper offers three main contributions: 1) the use of agents modeled according to organizational concepts, 2) the use of social patterns in software design that better match with users’ organization structures, and 3) the inclusion in an iterative development methodology that involves the user intensively in software development.