Automated Unit Testing for Agent Systems

Although agent technology is gaining world wide popularity, a hindrance to its uptake is the lack of proper testing mechanisms for agent based systems. While many traditional software testing methods can be generalized to agent systems, there are many aspects that are different and which require an understanding of the underlying agent paradigm. In this paper we present certain aspects of a testing framework that we have developed for agent based systems. The testing framework is a model based approach using the design models of the Prometheus agent development methodology. In this paper we focus on unit testing and identify the appropriate units, present mechanisms for generating suitable test cases and for determining the order in which the units are to be tested, present a brief overview of the unit testing process and an example. Although we use the design artefacts from Prometheus the approach is suitable for any plan and event based agent system.