Towards process lines for agent-oriented requirements engineering

Agent-oriented software products are becoming increasingly complicated, and the competitive market is forcing the producers to reduce time-to-market and increase the quality of the software produced. Therefore, developers have come to realize the need for more reliable and efficient agent-oriented software development processes (methodologies) which address the specific needs of each and every project. Software Process Lines provide a solution to this problem by using Process Line Engineering concepts for instantiating bespoke software processes. This research focuses on developing a software process line for Requirements Engineering (RE) in the context of agent-oriented software development. Our proposed Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering Process Line (AOREPL) incorporates a core base which can be directly used for instantiating an Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) process; it also defines variation points and variant method chunks to be added to the core base in order to create variant AORE processes. We also propose a step-by-step process line engineering method which enables process engineers to define and instantiate diverse AORE process lines.