A Framework for Collaborative and Interactive Agent-oriented Developer Operations

Considering the increasing prevalence of autonomous systems in today's society, one could expect that agent-oriented programming (AOP) is gaining traction among mainstream software engineering practitioners. However, the tools and frameworks that are used and developed in the academic multi-agent systems engineering community struggle to keep up with recent developments in the software industry in regards to how complex information systems are developed and maintained. An important aspect of recent changes in software engineering practices is the application of technologies that support the increasingly fast iteration of a programming-testing-deployment cycle. Such approaches require intense collaboration that crosses boundaries between traditionally separated roles like software development, quality assurance, and operations; these approaches are often referred to as DevOps. In this paper, we work towards the integration of DevOps and AOP by introducing an extension of jacamo-web, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports the collaborative, web-based development and real-time continuous integration of autonomous agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS).