Automated Continuous Testing of Multi-Agent Systems

Agent-based distributed systems are increasingly used in various application domains, where autonomy, proactivity and cooperation are required. Correspondingly, the demands on the quality of the delivered agents are growing. However, testing remains a challenging activity and systematic and automated approaches are still missing. We propose a novel framework for the continuous testing of multi-agent systems. In this framework, test cases are continuously generated and executed. Two techniques for the automated, continuous generation of test cases are investigated in this paper: (1) random; (2) evolutionary mutation. Preliminary experimental results, obtained on a case study, are encouraging and indicate that continuous testing can exercise a multiagent system more effectively than under the usual time constraints of manual testing.