Developer Operations and Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper, we propose the integration of approaches to Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS) with the Developer Operations (DevOps) industry best practice. Whilst DevOps facilitates the organizational autonomy of software teams, as well as the technological automation of testing, deployment, and operations pipelines, EMAS and the agent-oriented programming paradigm help instill autonomy into software artifacts. We discuss the benefits of integrating DevOps and EMAS, for example by highlighting the need for agent-oriented abstractions for quality assurance and test automation approaches. More generally, we introduce an agent-oriented perspective on the DevOps life-cycle and list a range of research challenges that are relevant for the integration of the DevOps and EMAS perspectives.