Quality-Driven Automatic Transformation of Object-Oriented Navigational Models

Navigability is a main concern in the design of Web applications. In order to assess such navigability a number of measures has been proposed. From them, measures defined on conceptual models are specially relevant, as it is well known that high quality conceptual models are critical to the success of the deployed system. However, measurement methods associated to such measures, as well as the design modifications that need to be performed on the models in order to improve their values, are usually tightly coupled with particular Web Engineering approaches. This fact compromises their effectiveness and their propagation capacity to different environments and/or methodologies. Our aim in this paper is to illustrate how navigability measures can be captured in a general manner, by instantiation of a measuring metamodel that is based on the Software Measurement Ontology proposed by Garćıa et al. In this way, not only is it possible to define a reusable set of relevant measures for a given family of applications, but also such measures can be queried in the context of MDA transformation rules. These rules capture both the measure decision criteria and the design modifications that should take place if the measure value for a given navigational model does not match such criteria.