Tropos: A Requirements-Driven Methodology for Agent-Oriented Software

Abstract

Software systems of the future will have to perform well within ever-changing organizational environments. Unfortunately, existing software development methodologies have traditionally been inspired by programming concepts rather than organizational ones, leading to a semantic gap between the system and its operational environment. To reduce this gap, we propose a software development methodology named Tropos that is founded on the i* organizational modeling framework. i* offers the notions of actor, goal, and (actor) dependency. Tropos uses these concepts as a basis to model early and late requirements, architectural design, and detailed design for a software system. The chapter outlines Tropos phases through an e-business example. The methodology is a good complement to proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms.