Metamodel-Based Metrics for Agent-Oriented Methodologies

A great number of methodologies has been already introduced in the agent-oriented software engineering field. Recently many of the authors of these methodologies also worked on their fragmentation thus obtaining portions (often called method or process fragments) that may be composed into new methodologies. The great advancement in this field, however does not correspond to equivalent results in the evaluation of the methodologies and their fragments. It is, for instance, difficult to select a fragment in the composition of a new methodology and to predict the methodology's resulting features. This work introduces a suite of metrics for evaluating and comparing entire methodologies but also their composing fragments. The proposed metrics are based on the multi-agent system metamodel. The metrics have been applied to the ADELFE and PASSI methodologies, results prove the usefulness of the proposed approach and encourage further studies on the matter.