An Inspection Technique Proposal for the Veriﬁcation of Requirements Speciﬁcation Documents for Multi-Agent Systems Giovane D’Avila Mendonc ¸a a , Gilleanes Thorwald Araujo Guedes b and Iderli Pereira de Souza Filho c Software Engineering Post-Graduation Program, Pampa Federal University, Av. Tiaraju, 810, Alegrete, Brazil Keywords: Requirements Engineering, Requirements Veriﬁcation, Requirements Inspection, Multi-Agent Systems, Perspective-Based Reading. Abstract: Requirements engineering is an important area of software engineering dedicated to eliciting, analysing, speci- fying, and validating software requirements to ensure the correct understanding of what needs to be developed. The requirements speciﬁcation objective is to provide a detailed description of what the software must do, it involves the production of a document that can be systematically reviewed, evaluated, and approved. Prob- lems in the requirements are appointed among the main causes of failures in software projects. Therefore, performing requirements veriﬁcation and validation is extremely important to ensure the software quality. Multi-Agent systems are a type of software with particular requirements, beyond the commonly found among other systems, since they are composed by several autonomous and proactive agents that divide the problem to be solved among them. Thus, requirements engineering needs to be adapted for this kind of system and the produced documents need to be veriﬁed too. Several techniques were proposed for requirements inspection, among them there is the Perspective-Based Reading. However, as in the other approaches, this technique does not allow the inspection of particular requirements for multi-agent systems. Taking this in consideration, our work has as its objective to adapt this technique so as to allow the veriﬁcation of requirements speciﬁcation documents speciﬁc for this kind of system. 1 INTRODUCTION Multi-Agent systems are characterized by being com- posed of several agents that interact among them- selves (Wooldridge, 2009). An agent is an au- tonomous, proactive, reactive, and with social skills process (Vicari and Gluz, 2007), moreover, an agent is able to performing actions without the user inter- vention (Wooldridge and Jennings, 1995) (Pornphol and Chittayasothorn, 2006) (Sivakumar et al., 2013). Multi-Agent systems became an alternative for the complex systems development (Labba et al., 2015). However, the development of this kind of system brought several challenges to the software engineering area, what entailed the emergence of AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) an area that mixes characteristics of several disciplines both from Software Engineering and Artiﬁcial Intel- a https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9445-6831 b https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5457-2600 c https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9694-0977 ligence (Cuesta et al., 2007). AOSE has, among its objectives, to adapt software engineering practices speciﬁcally for the agent-based systems development (Guedes and Vicari, 2010), that includes to produce methodologies, processes, techniques, modeling lan- guages, and tools for the multi-agent systems devel- opment (Genza and Mighele, 2013) (Mendonc ¸a et al., 2021). How could it be, AOSE also includes the adap- tation of Requirements Engineering for multi-agent systems. Requirements Engineering is a Software Require- ments area that is concerned with requirements elic- iting, analysing, specifying, and validating to ensure the correct understanding of what needs to be devel- oped (Fuentes-Fern´ andez et al., 2009). Requirements Engineering performs a crucial function for the devel- opment of any software, since, if the software needs were not understand correctly, the product will not satisfy those to whom its is destined (Mendonc ¸a et al., 2021). The main failures veriﬁed in software projects are related to problems in the requirements speciﬁcation, Mendonça, G., Guedes, G. and Filho, I. An Inspection Technique Proposal for the Veriﬁcation of Requirements Speciﬁcation Documents for Multi-Agent Systems. DOI: 10.5220/0010842700003116 In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agents and Artiﬁcial Intelligence (ICAART 2022) - Volume 1, pages 257-264 ISBN: 978-989-758-547-0; ISSN: 2184-433X Copyright c  2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 257