Exploring the Need for Specialized Testing Technique for an Agent-Based Software

221 Abstract— The field of Software Engineering has been complimented with a number of research works that helps in developing software products that performs well within ever-changing organizational environments. Functional efficiency of a product greatly depends on the software development approach used to build it and the testing techniques involved. Most widely used software development approaches are conventional approach, object-oriented approach and agent-oriented approach. Among the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases, software testing is an important activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets the functionality of the system like the actual code or the non-functional requirements of the system like amicable user interface. There are various testing strategies used in the conventional approach like unit testing, integration testing, validation testing and system testing. As all the basic entities are viewed as objects and classes in the object-oriented software development, conventional testing approaches are not suitable and thereby specialized object-oriented software testing evolves. Recent literature study claims that none of the existing Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies possesses testing phase in their SDLC stating that the software developed using agent paradigm were been tested using either conventional or object-oriented testing mechanism. Since the agent characteristics such as autonomy, pro-activity, reactivity, social ability, intelligence etc., differs with object characteristics, object-oriented testing mechanisms are not sufficient and also inadequate to test the agent oriented software. Thus this paper compares various approaches of building and testing the software with the help of a case study (online book store application) and thereby the need for a specialized agent-oriented software testing mechanism is justified for the better functional outcome of the software product developed using agent oriented approach