Software Maintenance and Reengineering in the Days of Software Agents

There is an ongoing paradigm shift in Software Engineering from object-orientation to agent-orientation. We review some of the reasons for this, and briefly overview the state-of-the-art in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). We then sketch some threads of long-term research on autonomic software, software monitoring and diagnosis, and requirements evolution. In addition, we discuss the impact this research may have on how software maintenance and reengineering is done in the future. The research reported is the result of collaborations with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto, Trento and a number of other academic institutions..