Towards Agent-Oriented Quality Management of Information Systems

The emergence of agent-oriented information systems imposes a great challenge to the current theories and methods of software quality management. The difficulties in the development of quality information systems are not only due to the openness of the environment, the diversity of platforms, the vast volume of distributed information in diverse formats, and the complicated combination of data and program, but also the dynamic lifecycles of such systems. In the paper, we report work in progress on agent-oriented quality management of distributed hypermedia and cooperative information systems. We first analyze the challenges that agent-oriented information systems impose upon established theory and technology of software quality management. We then present our growth lifecycle model of information systems development and outline our approach towards intelligent tool support of quality management activities in the development of information systems. 1 A vision of future information systems In common with other researchers, e.g. Marti Hearst (1998), Wendy Hall (1999a, 1999b), Giorgio De Michelis et al. (1997) and Gerd Wagner (1999), we envision that the future information systems will have the following features. • Distributed. The information will be distributed over a number of computers. The services will be delivered through computer networks such as Internet and LAN. • Multimedia. The information will be stored and presented in a number of different types of media and forms, including numerical data, text, image, video, sound, etc. These media are combined together into multimedia. • Interactive. The information will be organised into a non-linear structure. The users will be enabled to participate interactively in the information retrieval and presentation through searching, browsing and enquiring. • Cooperative. The information system will cooperate intelligently with the user to provide services more effectively and efficiently. To achieve this, it will also work in cooperation with other information systems or other types of software. Such cooperative behaviour may be implemented through agent technology.