Towards organization-oriented software engineering

Software systems are subject to ever increasing complexity and in need of efficient structuring. The concept of organization as an expressive and abstract realworld reference presents a promising starting point. In the field of computer science, organizations have particularly been studied within the multi-agent systems community. However, the individual agent metaphor turns out to be of rather small granularity and somewhat less suited for large-scale software systems. To overcome this problem while preserving the earnings of the agent-oriented approach to software engineering, this paper introduces the new metaphor of organizational unit. This concept allows to summarize a set of units in a manner that complex systems may be regarded and treated as wholes and exhibit corporate agency. According to different levels of analysis drawn from organization theory, different types of organizational units are incorporated into a reference architecture for organization-oriented software engineering.