Search

In this paper, we describe research results arising from a technology transfer exercise on agent-oriented requirements engineering with an industry partner. We introduce two improvements to the state-of-the-art in agent-oriented requirements engineering, designed to mitigate two problems experienced by ourselves and our industry partner: (1) the lack of systematic methods for agent-oriented requirements elicitation and modelling; and (2) the lack of prescribed deliverables in agent-oriented requirements engineering. We discuss the application of our new approach to an aircraft turnaround simulator built in conjunction with our industry partner, and show how agent-oriented models can be derived and used to construct a complete requirements package. We evaluate this by having three independent people design and implement prototypes of the aircraft turnaround simulator, and comparing the three prototypes. Our evaluation indicates that our approach is effective at delivering correct, complete, and consistent requirements that satisfy the stakeholders, and can be used in a repeatable manner to produce designs and implementations. We discuss lessons learnt from applying this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we develop a general framework to reason about testing. The difficulty of testing is assessed in terms of the amount of tests that must be applied to determine whether the system is correct or not. Based on this criterion, five testability classes are presented and related. We also explore conditions that enable and disable finite testability, and their relation to testing hypotheses is studied. We measure how far incomplete test suites are from being complete, which allows us to compare and select better incomplete test suites. The complexity of finding that measure, as well as the complexity of finding minimum complete test suites, is identified. Furthermore, we address the reduction of testing problems to each other, that is, we study how the problem of finding test suites to test systems of some kind can be reduced to the problem of finding test suites for another kind of systems. This enables to export testing methods. In order to illustrate how general notions are applied to specific cases, many typical examples from the formal testing techniques domain are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]