Coral Calero (Universidad de Castilla-la-Mancha, Spain)

The World Wide Web has become a major delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their ubiquitous usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve. Due to the special characteristics of web engineering, all the aspects related to quality are essential in order to assure that web applications not only develop the expected functionality, but also do it in the best manner.

However, when talking about quality, several aspects arise, all of them of great importance but not always considered. One of the problems is the lack of consensus when talking about web quality. What does web quality mean? Which are the important aspects of quality? When must quality be considered? Moreover, there are other important aspects, such as the rapid evolution of web technologies, so, how can web quality evolve as fast as technologies? How can we assure the quality in the context of web 2.0, where the interaction of the user with the web is becoming more and more important? Are all quality aspects still important, or it is enough to assure usability, or data quality? Is this also true for other domains, for example e-commerce?

Answering these questions is of prime importance in order to determine which are the really important aspects of web quality. Once we know them, we can pay attention only to them during the development process in such a manner that we will be able to achieve the maximum quality with the minimum effort.

The aim of this track was to have contributions on how to leverage web-based systems quality with Web Engineering techniques, as well as how to induce quality assurance in the Web Engineering lifecycle itself.

During the track nine papers were presented:

“CSS Code Quality: A Metric for Abstractness – Or Why Humans Beat Machines in CSS Coding” by Matthias Keller and Martin Nussbaumer where authors introduce the abstractness factor, a quality metric which reveals the advantages of human authored code and can serve as an optimization criterion and benchmark for automated CSS coding. “A Metrics-Based Approach to Technical Documentation Quality” by Anna Wingkvist, Morgan Ericsson, Rüdiger Lincke and Welf Löwe. This paper suggests an approach based on the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm to define and assess the quality of technical documentation. On the approach predefined quality goals are continuously assessed and visualized by the use of metrics. “Gathering Information About Web 2.0 Applications for Usability Engineering” by Ludger Martin presents techniques to gather usage information about a web 2.0 application. With the help of this information, a usability engineer can interpret usability data accurately and improve the chances for adoption of the web application by a wide range of users. “Adaptive quality control of web resources” by Nuno Escudeiro and Paula Escudeiro proposes to evaluate and control resources’ global quality based on a three-dimensional space with dimensions representing Automation, Efficacy and Efficiency. “Web Sites Quality: Does It Depend on the Application Domain?” by Américo Rio and Fernando Brito e Abreu presents a preliminary proposal for a website quality evaluation approach based on fully automatic collection of website quality indicators, grouped by ISO9126 quality characteristics. “Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications” by Giuseppe Di Lucca, Bernardi Mario Luca and Damiano Distante proposes a Model Driven Re-Engineering approach to drive the semi-automatic re-design of existing Web Applications to improve their design, by recovering Ubiquitous Web Applications conceptual models of the existing application and using them to semi-automatically develop a new design adopting the MVC architectural pattern. “Automatic Selection of RIA Software Architectures using Quality Models” by Santiago Meliá, Jesús Pardillo and Cristina Cachero reporting a quality-driven approach for the systematic construction of RIA architectures that integrates model-driven development and software product lines principles to select and derive in a semiautomatic way the most suitable RIA architecture based on a set of predefined quality requirements. “Comprehending Ajax Web Applications by the DynaRIA Tool” by Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Armando Polcaro and Porfirio Tramontana presents a tool for the comprehension of RIAs implemented in Ajax that is based on dynamic analysis and provides functionalities for recording and analyzing user sessions from several perspectives, and producing various types of abstractions and visualizations about the run-time behavior of the application. Finally, “Improving Quality of Web-GIS Modularity Using Aspects” by Ana Oliveira, Matias Urbieta, João Araújo, Armanda Rodrigues, Ana Moreira, Sílvia Gordillo and Gustavo Rossi presents an aspect-oriented approach for Web-GIS applications that models crosscutting spatial concerns and handles the volatile nature of some spatial concerns as if these were crosscutting. Thus, both types of concerns, crosscutting and volatile, are modeled as candidate aspects. By modularizing volatile concerns as aspects, it is simple to add and remove them at runtime from an application by using dynamic weaving.

• Chair - Coral Calero (Universidad de Castilla-la-Mancha)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - João de Sousa Saraiva (INESC-ID)

• Maria Angeles Moraga. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
• Mourad Badri. UQTR, Canada
• Angelica Caro. University of Bio-Bio, Chile
• Piero Fraternali. Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Nora Koch. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Germany
• Sandro Morasca. Universitá degli Studi dell'Insubria. Italy
• Gustavo Rossi. University of La Plata. Argentina
• Antonio Vallecillo. University of Malaga. Spain

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