This paper addresses one of the major web end-user software engineering (WEUSE) challenges, namely, how to
verify and validate software products built using a life cycle enacted by end-user programmers. Few end-user
development support tools implement an engineering life cycle adapted to the needs of
end users. End users do not have the programming knowledge, training or experience to perform devel- opment
tasks requiring creativity. Elsewhere we published a life cycle adapted to this challenge. With
the support of a wizard, end-user programmers follow this life cycle and develop rich internet applica- tions (RIA)
to meet specific end-user requirements. However, end-user programmers regard verification and validation activities
as being secondary or unnecessary for opportunistic programming tasks. Hence, although the solutions that they
develop may satisfy specific requirements, it is impossible to guarantee the quality or the reusability of this
software either for this user or for other developments by future end-user programmers. The challenge, then, is to
find means of adopting a verification and validation workflow and adding verification and validation activities to the
existing WEUSE life cycle. This should
not involve users having to make substantial changes to the type of work that they do or to their priori- ties. In
this paper, we set out a verification and validation life cycle supported by a wizard that walks the user through test
case-based component, integration and acceptance testing. This wizard is well-aligned with WEUSE’s characteristic
informality, ambiguity and opportunisticity. Users applying this verification and validation process manage to find
bugs and errors that they would otherwise be unable to identify. They also receive instructions for error correction.
This assures that their composite applications are of
better quality and can be reliably reused. We also report a user study in which users develop web soft- ware with
and without a wizard to drive verification and validation. The aim of this user study is to confirm the applicability
and effectiveness of our wizard in the verification and validation of a RIAEuropean Union (UE) GA FP7-216048European Union (UE) GA FP7-285248European Union (UE) GA FP7-258862Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-R (POLOLAS)Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED
