Quality Assurance of Agent-Based and Self-Managed Systems

The challenges in implementing intelligent and autonomous software systems remain the development of self-adapting systems, self-healing applications, corporate global creation, and collaborated robotic teams. With software agent technology widely recognized as a key approach in implementing such global infrastructure, the importance of the role of quality assurance of agent-based systems and system development is growing daily.

Based on the authors’ more than fifteen years of experience in software agent technology, Quality of Agent-Based and Self-Managed Systems presents the basics principles and structures of agent technology. It covers the main quality issues of software system development and provides examples of agent measurement and evaluation. The authors focus on software agent systems and multi-agent systems (MAS) and discuss the determination of quality properties. They also explain different techniques and approaches to evaluate the development of MAS. The final chapter summarizes quality assurance approaches for agent-based systems and discusses some open problems and future directions.

Although often complex and difficult to manage, the applications for software agent systems in essential life systems increase every day. Since the quality of the agent-based self-managing systems is a central point of software risks, analyzing, evaluating, and improving the quality measurement situation will always be a concern when developing these systems. With more than sixty illustrations and twenty tables, this book builds a foundation in quality and quality control for agent-based technology.

Reiner R. Dumke is currently working at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Germany, as a professor with software engineering as research field. He is one of the founders of the Software Measurement Laboratory (SML@b) of the computer science department at the University of Magdeburg and co-editor of the Measurement News Journal.

Steffen Mencke holds a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science (2005) and a Ph.D. degree from the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Germany. The German state of Saxony-Anhalt awarded him a scholarship to work on his Ph.D. thesis about "Proactive Ontology-Based Content Provision in the Context of e-Learning", which he successfully defended in 2008. His research interest covers the Semantic Web, Agent Technology, e-Learning and Software Engineering.

Cornelius Wille teaches in software engineering as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Bingen, Germany.