Designing multi-agent unit tests using systematic test design patterns-(extended version)

  • Authors:

  • Mohamed A. Khamis;Khaled Nagi

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Software agents are the basic building blocks in many software systems especially those based on artificial intelligence methods, e.g., reinforcement learning based multi-agent systems (MASs). However, testing software agents is considered a challenging problem. This is due to the special characteristics of agents which include its autonomy, distributed nature, intelligence, and heterogeneous communication protocols. Following the test-driven development (TDD) paradigm, we present a framework that allows MAS developers to write test scenarios that test each agent individually. The framework relies on the concepts of building mock agents and testing common agent interaction design patterns. We analyze the most common agent interaction patterns including pair and mediation patterns in order to provide stereotype implementation for their corresponding test cases. These implementations serve as test building blocks and are provided as a set of ready-for-reuse components in our repository. This way, the developer can concentrate on testing the business logic itself and spare him/her the burden of implementing tests for the underlying agent interaction patterns. Our framework is based on standard components such as the JADE agent platform, the JUnit framework, and the eclipse plug-in architecture. In this paper, we present in details the design and function of the framework. We demonstrate how we can use the proposed framework to define more stereotypes in the code repository and provide a detailed analysis of the code coverage for our designed stereotype test code implementations.