User and System Stories: An Agile Approach for Managing Requirements in AOSE

The agile software development life cycle is widely used in industry today due to its highly flexible and iterative processes that facilitate rapid prototyping. There has been recent work in bringing concepts and processes from agile methodologies to agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). We contribute to this effort by presenting in this paper a novel approach to capturing requirements of agent systems in AOSE using and extending agile concepts. In this paper, we propose to adopt and extend the well-known concept of User Stories to facilitate the development of agent systems. We introduce a novel concept, System Story, that defines requirements from the perspective of the system. These System Stories are refinements of User Stories and provide more intuitive mappings to agent concepts in the design and implementation. We show how our approach allows better traceability of requirements between stories and the different software development artifacts. We validate our proposal with a feature-based comparison to recent related work, and a preliminary user evaluation based on a drone simulation of a simple search and rescue case study.