Agent-Oriented Information Systems Development Using Open and the Agent Factory

Information systems development (ISD) requires the underpinning of a high quality methodology (which includes elements to describe both the process of development and the work products which are the consumables used and produced by the process). However, each ISD project is different and the best-fit methodology is also consequently different. This means that a one-size-fits-all methodology will only rarely give ideal results (Cockburn, 2000), when the tenets of the methodology designer coincidentally coincide with those of the particular project. Rather than seeking an all-encompassing methodology, we advocate here the use of method engineering (Brinkkemper, 1996) or, preferably, situational method engineering or SME (Ter Hofstede and Verhoef, 1997). SME involves defining a repository of method fragments together with techniques for assembling these method fragments or method chunks (Rolland and Prakash, 1996) into site-specific methodologies specifically tuned to the situation of the project at hand (Brinkkemper, 1996) i.e. one that meets the requirements of a particular project. Thus, selection of method fragments is individualized and “tailored” to the specific requirements of the organization and project using construction guidelines supplied with the repository (Brinkkemper et al., 1998; Ralyté and Rolland, 2001). Many papers describing situational method engineering tend to focus on the process engineering element rather than the combination of process and product viz. the “methodology”. Since “process” is therefore a subset of “methodology”, when discussing only the “process” component of a methodology, the term process engineering is often substituted for the broader term “method engineering”. For commercial adoption, the first choice is a widely used methodology framework with an existing extensive catalogue of method fragments. OPEN (Object-oriented Process,