Measuring the Social Ability of Software Agents

To evaluate the global quality of a software agent it is necessary to define appropriate quality characteristics and to determine a set of measures for these features. A comprehensive set of measures has not yet been developed for agent-oriented software. However, some software measures have been adopted from other software paradigms, especially from the object-oriented paradigm because they have features in common. A key characteristic defining a software agent is its social ability, that is, its ability to interact with other agents to achieve its goals. This paper presents a first approximation to a set of measures for evaluating the social ability of software agents for use in the calculation of a global value for this characteristic.