Agent Oriented Software Testing – Role Oriented approach

Several Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies were proposed to build open, heterogeneous and complex internet based systems. AOSE methodologies offer different conceptual frameworks, notations and techniques, thereby provide a platform to make the system abstract, generalize, dynamic and autonomous. Lifecycle coverage is one of the important criteria for evaluating an AOSE methodology. Most of the existing AOSE methodologies focuses only on analysis, design, implementation and disregarded testing, stating that the testing can be done by extending the existing objectoriented testing techniques. Though objects and agents have some similarities, they both differ widely. Role is an important attribute of an agent that has a huge scope and support for the analysis, design and implementation of Multi-Agent System (MAS). The main objective of the paper is to extend the scope and support of role towards testing, thereby the vacancy for software testing perception in the AOSE series will be filled up. This paper presents an overview of role based testing based on the V-Model in order to add the next new component as of AgentOriented Software testing in the agent oriented development life cycle. Keywords-Agent oriented software enginerring; Multi-Agent System; Role oriented testing.