Web Application Evaluation and Refactoring: A Quality-Oriented Improvement Approach

Web applications must be usable and accessible; at the same time, their continuous evolution makes it difficult to keep a high degree of external quality. Refactoring is a practice of agile methods well-suited for the maintenance and evolution of Web applications. However, this practice is mainly intended and used to improve maintainability and extensibility of the design and code rather than external qualities such as usability. We believe that the concept of refactoring as “behavior-preserving transformations” can be applied to the navigation and presentation models of a Web application with the purpose of improving external quality. For this reason we have defined the concept of Web model refactoring. This paper demonstrates how it is possible to improve the external quality of a Web application by combining a mature quality measurement and evaluation method (WebQEM) with Web model refactoring. WebQEM is used to identify needs for improvement, recommend Web model refactorings and assess their impact on some defined attributes of a Web product entity. We present a case study showing how a typical shopping cart in an e-commerce site can improve its usability and content quality with our integrated improvement approach.