Quality Issues on Model-Driven Web Engineering Methodologies

Nowadays, there are several development methodologies in the field of model-driven web engineering (MDWE) which involve different levels of modeldriven architecture (MDA): CIM, PIM, PSM, or code. Attending to the high number of available methodologies, development teams may feel lost when choosing the most suitable one for their projects. Furthermore, proposals usually appear and people feel necessary to evaluate their quality in order to select the appropriate methodology or even to find out the way to improve them. This chapter presents the current work carried out in this field and it is oriented toward the definition of a framework which enables an objective measurement of the proposals’ benefits.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-67843-C06-03Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-30391-

QuEF: An environment for the assesment of MDWE methodologies

This paper presents QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework), an environment for the assesment of Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) methodologies. This approach is oriented to evaluate, through objectives measures, the quality of MDWE methodologies in a specific environment. Given the high number of methodologies available and proposed in the last years, it has become necessary to define objective evaluation tools to enable development teams to improve their methodological environment and help designers of web methodologies design new effective and efficient tools, processes and techniques. Since methodologies are constantly evolving, the need may arise not only to evaluate the quality but also to find out how it can be improved and how the quality improvement process could be optimize in order to reduce costs. Besides, an example of application to the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques) methodology is presented and the Functionality of the NDT methodology is evaluated in terms of MDE and Maturity characteristics.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-67843-C06-03Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-30391-

Identification of Software Quality Characteristics on Academic Application In Higher Education Institution (HEI)

The purpose of an academic application in higher education is to ease the user in managing their daily activities using the system. Among the largest users category in higher education institutions are academicians. The system is a critical system because it is the backbone of the institution where important tasks are performed using the system. Some of the examples of academic applications are course management system, program structure management, e-course teaching evaluation, and eLearning. Different universities may have their own academic applications. In software engineering, quality of the system is a vital element to ensure the system is accepted by the user. Various software models are available representing the good quality model. This research describes the processes in identifying the quality factors for academic application based on the importance of the quality factors from the user's perspectives

Quality-aware mashup composition: issues, techniques and tools

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. In different contexts, ranging from the consumer Web to Enterprise systems, the potential of this new technology is to make users evolve from passive receivers of applications to actors actively involved in the creation of their artifacts, thus accommodating the inherent variability of the users’ needs. Current advances in mashup technologies are good candidates to satisfy this requirement. However, some issues are still largely unexplored. In particular, quality issues specific for this class of applications, and the way they can guide the users in the identification of adequate components and composition patterns, are neglected. This paper discusses quality dimensions that can capture the intrinsic quality of mashup components, as well as the components’ capacity to maximize the quality and the userperceived value of the overall composition. It also proposes an assisted composition process in which quality becomes the driver for recommending to the users how to complete mashups, based on the integration of quality assessment and recommendation techniques within a tool for mashup development

Marco de caracterización para la cuantificación de la calidad en componentes web

Web development is rapidly evolving both in technologies available and services being offe­red. Software engineering that lies behind has not been quite able to keep up with the new challenges that have to be addressed. However, encapsulation and interoperability have been pushed forward with a new paradigm: web components. Using package management tools, developers with different level of programming expertise reuse web components from many sources. Nevertheless, web components still lack a quality framework universally accepted. It is difficult to assess how good or bad a component is.El desarrollo web está evolucionando muy rápidamente tanto en tecnología como en los servicios que ofrece. La ingeniería de software que subyace, por su parte, no ha sido capaz de adaptarse a los nuevos problemas que presenta esta evolución. La encapsulación y la interoperabilidad han permitido el nacimiento de nuevos paradigmas de desarrollo donde usuarios finales sin conocimientos de programación, intermediarios y proveedores crean, explotan y reutilizan elementos conocidos como «componentes web». Sin embargo, los componentes web todavía carecen de un marco de calidad que sea aceptado universalmente, capaz de cuantificar lo bueno o malo que es un componente

Langage de mashup pour l'intégration autonomique de services de données dans des environements dynamiques

The integration of the information coming from data services or data sources in virtual communities is user centred, i.e. associated to visualization issues determined by user needs. A virtual community can be seen as a cyberspace that can be customized by every user by specifying the information he/she is interested in and the way it should be retrieved and presented respecting specific security and QoS properties. Such requirements must be defined or inferred and then interpreted for building customized visualisations. Nowadays, there is no simple declarative language of mashups for retrieving; integrating and visualizing data produced by data services, according to spatio-temporal specifications. The purpose of this thesis is to develop such a language. This work is done within the framework of the REDSHINE project (red-shine.imag.fr) supported by the Grenoble INP "Bonus Qualité Recherche"Dans les communautés virtuelles, l'intégration des informations (provenant de sources ou services de données) est centrée sur les utilisateurs, i.e., associée à la visualisation d'informations déterminée par les besoins des utilisateurs. Une communauté virtuelle peut donc être vue comme un espace de données personnalisable par chaque utilisateur en spécifiant quelles sont ses informations d'intérêt et la façon dont elles doivent être présentées en respectant des contraintes de sécurité et de qualité de services (QoS). Ces contraintes sont définies ou inférées puis interprétées pour construire des visualisations personnalisées. Il n'existe pas aujourd'hui de langage déclaratif simple de mashups pour récupérer, intégrer et visualiser des données fournies par des services selon des spécifications spatio-temporelles. Dans le cadre de la thèse il s'agit de proposer un tel langage. Ce travail est réalisé dans le cadre du projet Redshine, bénéficiant d'un Bonus Qualité Recherche de Grenoble INP

TV in the Age of the Internet: Information Quality of Science Fiction TV Fansites

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Information Science, 2011Communally created Web 2.0 content on the Internet has begun to compete with information provided by traditional gatekeeper institutions, such as academic journals, medical professionals, and large corporations. On the one hand, such gatekeepers need to understand the nature of this competition, as well as to try to ensure that the general public are not endangered by poor quality information. On the other hand, advocates of free and universal access to basic social services have argued that communal efforts can provide as good or better-quality versions of commonly needed resources. This dissertation arises from these needs to understand the nature and quality of information being produced on such websites. Website-oriented information quality (IQ) literature spans at least 15 different academic fields, a survey of which identified two types of IQ: perceptual and artifactual fitness-related, and representational accuracy and completeness-related. The current project studied websites in terms of all of these, except perceptual fitness. This study may be the only of its kind to have targeted fansites: websites made by fans of a mass media franchise. Despite the Internet's becoming a primary means by which millions of people consume and co-produce their entertainment, little academic attention has been paid to the IQ of sites about the mass media. For this study, the four central non-studio-affiliated sites about a highly popular and fan-engaging science fiction television franchise, Stargate, were chosen, and their IQ examined across sites having different sizes as well as editorial and business models. As exhaustive of samples as possible were collected from each site. Based on 21 relevant variables from the IQ literature, four qualitative and 17 exploratory statistical analyses were conducted. Key findings include: five possibly new IQ criteria; smaller sites concerned more with pleasing connoisseuring fans than the general public; larger sites being targeted towards older users; professional editors serving their own interests more than users'; wikis' greater user freedom attracting more invested and balanced writers; for-profit sites being more imposing upon, and less protecting of, users than non-profit sites; and the emergence of common writing styles, themes, data fields, advertisement types, linking strategies, and page types

Évaluation de la qualité des applications web : approche probabiliste

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Razvoj sveobuhvatne metode evaluacije upotrebljivosti web zasnovanih geografskih informacionih sistema za specijalne namene

Today, many various kinds of GIS applications are in everyday use. GIS is defined as a set of tools used to collect, store, retrieve, transform and display spatial data from the real world. Today, Web browser is used as a general multi-purpose client application and it provides “well-known” user environment because people are used to use Internet so they know how to work with a web browser. The users of Web-based geographic information systems (Web GIS) are mostly casual end users who have only a very low computer literacy and limited knowledge of GIS technologies. This is why Web-based GIS applications should be designed very carefully and with a strong focus on their usability. Usability is one relevant factor of the quality of Web applications. Recently, it has been receiving great attention, being recognized as a fundamental property for the success of Web applications. Determining the degree of usability is a process in which systems are evaluated in order to determine success product using methods available to the evaluator. One of the current goals of the Web engineering research is defining methods for ensuring usability. Usability as a quality characteristics is defined by many authors and several ISO standards. Many various methods of usability evaluation have been developed. These studies are certainly important as that would further deepen our understanding on factors that contributes towards the usability of Web GIS applications. One important success factor is, therefore, the need to warranty the levels of quality of the Web GIS as software products. High-quality software products are essential to provide value, and avoid potential negative consequences, for the stakeholders. Assessing the quality in use will allow Web GIS application owners to estimate how usable a Web GIS application might be and the user’s satisfaction. User characteristics are also important determinants of usability. The term 'context' includes the characteristics of the users and the work goals they are seeking to achieve, as well as the technical, physical and organizational environments in which they work. Therefore, this PhD thesis describes a practical method for identifying contextual aspects of usability in software systems, and for helping ensure that usability evaluations reflect the context of use and give data with acceptable validity. Attempts to objectively evaluate usability of information systems are old. In order to evaluate the quality of developed systems, a set of quality characteristics and criteria are required as a basis to describe the system quality. During the decades, different literature described various models and attributes of usability. Many usability models have been proposed to allow software usability evaluation. The main purpose of the software product usability model is to specify and assess the level of usability of a product through internal measures of inherent properties of the software, and through external measures of the behavior of the system of which the software is part. Aim of the PhD thesis is to propose a suitable usability model for evaluating the usability of Web-based GIS applications. Researchers have not developed yet any model that precisely describes usability definition and all its attributes that takes into account the varying aspects of usability. It developes a new more comprehensive definition of quality in use, which has usability in use, flexibility in use, satisfaction in use and safety in use as characteristics that can be quantified from the perspectives of different stakeholders, including users, managers and maintainers. Since all of the usability factors do not have the same importance in the overall usability assessment of the WebGIS applications, the proposed factors have been weighted by adopting AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) approach. The main goal of this PhD thesis is to propose a comprehensive methodology for usability evaluation and identify the most serious usability problems of special purpose Web-based geographic information system. Usability evaluation can increase software quality and its capability to satisfy users and their needs. The proposed methodology should lead to decreasing time necessary for evaluation of applications and results processing