Abstract
The initial step of any software engineering methodology is to form
requirements. Recently, a goal-oriented approach to requirements
has been proposed and argued to be beneficial. Goals also play a
key role in the implementation of proactive software agents. However,
although some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies have
incorporated (aspects of) goal-oriented requirements engineering
and although they target agent platforms that provide goals as an
implementation construct, none of the methodologies provide a goal-oriented
design process. We present three modifications to the Prometheus
methodology, which aim to make it more goal-oriented in its design
phases: we introduce a goal coupling diagram as an adjunct to the
existing data coupling diagram, we modify the temporal design artefacts
to include goals and we introduce a number of goal-related consistency
checks. Finally, we report on an experimental evaluation comparing
the effectiveness of the original and refined methodologies.
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