Practitioners Views on Web Development: An Industrial Survey by Semi-Structured Interviews

Several companies with experience in web development were interviewed about aspects of software engineering (SE) when developing Web applications. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to investigate their development processes, quality assurance (including metrics used) and tool support. The interviews are a first stage of empirical assessment. Among research observations identified are the lack of methods, activities and artefacts to reflect hypermedia characteristics (structure, content and navigation) of web applications. Another finding highlights the difficulties and lack of rigour when planning web-based applications because of the novelty of this type of application. In general, quality is assessed in an ad-hoc manner, without following any process or guidelines. Equally, reuse is also carried out in an ad-hoc manner and sometimes components are developed from scratch because developers do not trust the quality of the components or the sources. Last but not least, there is a lack of quantitative feedback to quality improvements of both processes and products related to web development. Future work will investigate some of the issues raised from the interviews. Investigations will consist of evaluating different hypermedia methods and processes to model Web applications (e.g., extending UML) by means of sound quality models such as ISO9216, ISO15504, etc. Further, our approach will incorporate quality metrics in the development processes by which could be automated and analysed to estimate and enhance quality characteristics of the software process itself and those of the product.