On Complex Networks in Software: How Agent-Orientation Effects Software Structures

摘要

Software-Engineering provides techniques to ease handling the essential complexity of software. A number of engineering paradigms and architectures have been devised and each generation claims to relieve future development efforts. But to date little is known about how different development approaches affect the underlying implemenation structures, making their contributions arguable. Recently, the statistical analysis of large-scale modular software systems - represented as directed graphs - revealed complex system characteristics, namely scale-free and small-world phenomena. In this paper, we argue that the exhibited network characteristics reflect utilized design approaches and apply graph analysis to examine the structural differences imposed by the utilization of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. As this novel development paradigm proposes autonomous and pro-active entities as an atomic design and development metaphor for complicated and inherently distributed software systems, an initial analysis and comparison of graphs abstracting both agent- and object-oriented system designs reveals structural differences which suggest that agent autonomy influences the resulting underlying implementation structures.