Seamless Integration and Testing for MAS Engineering

Testing undeniably plays a central role in the daily practice of software engineering, and this explains why better and more efficient libraries and services are continuously made available to developers and designers. Could the MAS developers community similarly benefit from utilizing state-of-the-art testing approaches? The paper investigates the possibility of bringing modern software testing tools as those used in mainstream software engineering into multi-agent systems engineering. Our contribution explores and illustrates, by means of a concrete example, the possible interactions between the agent-based programming framework ASC2 (AgentScript Cross-Compiler) and various testing approaches (unit/agent testing, integration/system testing, continuous integration) and elaborate on how the design choices of ASC2 enable these interactions.