# Comparison of Multi-Agent Platform Usability for Industrial-Grade Applications
## 5 AOSE in Contrast to Modern SDLC
### Documentation  
Documentation plays a significant role in building trust among developers towards a given framework and, therefore, can affect their decision to adopt a particular technology [67]. Well-documented code streamlines development, reduces costs, and improves the quality of the final product. It serves as a knowledge transfer tool, becoming particularly essential when the technology being considered is not widely used within the industry and when there are not many specialists available to share their expertise. This is precisely what makes comprehensive documentation imperative in the context of AOSE. The lack of adequate documentation has been identified as one of the main problems faced by beginner programmers seeking to use agent systems. As of now, it is common for MAS platforms to provide one-pagers that outline only their general features and concepts (e.g., Cresco [68], CloneMap [69]). Further, it is often found that agent platforms provide only simplistic examples without sufficient information needed to construct moderately complex applications (e.g., osBrain [70]). Most often, however, agent platforms provide incomplete or outdated documentation, which does not reflect their most recent functionality. In this context, Table 4 summarises the state of documentation in each of the selected representative agent platforms. The documentation of the JADE 4.6 API, user guides, and examples can be accessed on the JADE website. The main issue here is the limited JavaDoc coverage of public methods and fields. Specifically, an analysis conducted using the MetricsReloaded plugin indicated that the JavaDocs coverage of methods in JADE reaches only around 41%. As a reference,a similar JavaDoc coverage assessment for the commonly used Apache Commons Lang library yielded results close to 93%. In terms of JADE, the methods included in the latest 4.6 version are especially under-documented. For example, the _TemplateBasedMessageQueue_ class has around 14% of its methods documented. This, combined with the lack of up-to-date user guides and illustrative examples (the latest user guides were created around 2010), makes it difficult to fully utilise the most recent features of the platform. Moreover, the incompleteness of some of the descriptions (e.g., information that the method _acquire()_ called on an agent locks the agent) necessitates developers to study the source code, which can significantly hinder the software development process. Similar to JADE, Jadex documentation also does not cover the changes included in Jadex-V. The materials available on the website refer to Jadex 3, while the latest API documentation includes the release of version 4.0.241. Both of these were uploaded more than two years ago, but as discussed with the platform's authors, Jadex has still been under incremental development since then. This suggests that, as of now, the description of features implemented over the past two years is incomplete. However, in contrast to JADE, the JavaDoc coverage of the Jadex-V API is much greater, reaching 80%, which can be considered sufficient in terms of industrial-grade standards. Finally, in contrast to JADE and Jadex, SPADE has the narrowest documentation. Specifically, it does not include detailed user guides and focuses primarily on simple examples of the platform's usage. As such, it may not be sufficiently extensive to assist developers in implementing more complex systems. However, among all representative platforms, SPADE documentation is the most frequently updated. As indicated in the history of changes, the documentation is updated, on average, twice per year, with the last update made in mid-2023. Moreover, all new SPADE features are regularly being described in research papers [71]. It should be noted that such papers may serve as an appropriate source of information from the conceptual perspective. However, they may not be appropriate for quick inquiries about implementation details in the case of development concerns.