Towards Requirement Traceability in TROPOS

If we are to be successful in the development of the next generation of agent oriented systems we must deal with the critical issue of requirements traceability. Failure to do so will imply in higher costs and longer corrective and adaptable maintenance. Unfortunately most agent-oriented methodologies are not addressing this issue. Requirement traceability is intended to ensure continued alignment between stakeholders’ requirements and various outputs of the system development process. In this paper we show how traceability could be applied to agent oriented development paradigm. In fact, software developers have used agents as a way to understand, model, and develop more naturally an important class of complex system. The growth of interest in software agents has recently led to the development of new methodologies based on agent concepts. However, few agent-oriented methodologies are requirement driven, or recognize traceability as an important issue to be supported. In this paper we argue that requirement traceability must be considered in agent-oriented methodologies. In particular we show how a general-purpose traceability approach can be used in the context of the Tropos framework. An e-commerce case study is used to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.