Techniques and Utilities to Improve the Design, Development and Debugging of Multiagent Applications with Agile Principles

Construction and use of software agents for industrial and business computer systems is a well-known subject for professional development teams. But the full potential of Agent-Oriented programming usually remains hidden to these groups and agents are usually not exploited to their full potential. This study shows the description and implementation of a number of techniques created to face the construction of agents composed of a number of behaviors that may be debugged and revised in a step-by-step fashion, both at design and at runtime. The set of techniques also include a mechanism for managing the orchestration of behaviors, what gives the development teams insight on the final behavior resulting from the combination of the individual ones. These techniques allow the application of agile software development principles to multiagent environments, making it easier to integrate these kind of software artifacts into complex projects using this paradigm. The paper also describes two practical sample use cases where these techniques are employed: the application of the techniques to the simple JADE DummyAgent and to complex rule-based agents that run behaviors based on CLIPS or JESS rules.