Evaluating Methodologies: A Requirements Engineering Approach Through the Use of an Exemplar

Systems development methodologies continue to be a central area of research in software engineering. As the nature of applications and systems usage move increasingly towards open networked environments, not only are new methodologies required, but new ways for evaluating methodologies for these new environments are also required. The agent-oriented approach to software engineering introduces concepts such as pro-activeness and autonomy to achieve more flexible and robust systems for complex applications environments. A number of AOSE methodologies have been proposed. In order to evaluate and compare these methods in depth, we proposed the use of a common exemplar - a detailed application setting within which each of the methodologies will be worked out. The evaluation method emphasizes a requirements engineering perspective. In this paper we show how to apply this exemplar to evaluate three agent-oriented methodologies.