Knowledge Level Software Engineering

We contend that, at least in the first stages of definition of the early and late requirements, the software development process should be articulated using knowledge level concepts. These concepts include actors, who can be (social, organizational, human or software) agents, positions or roles, goals, and social dependencies for defining the obligations of actors to other actors. The goal of this paper is to instantiate this claim by describing how Tropos, an agent-oriented software engineering methodology based on knowledge level concepts, can be used in the development of a substantial case study consisting of the meeting scheduler problem.