Reading Techniques for Web Application Design

Transcription

1 Reading Techniques for Web Application Design Tayana Uchôa Conte Advisor: Guilherme Horta Travassos Colaborator: Emília Mendes 1 Programa de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computação (PESC) - COPPE Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) Caixa Postal Rio de Janeiro RJ Brazil 1 Computer Science Department, The University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand {tayana,ght}@cos.ufrj.br emilia@cs.auckland.ac.nz Level: Doctoral Degree Admission Year: 2004 Expected Conclusion Date: March/2008 Expected Qualifier Exam Approval Date: October/2005 Abstract. This paper presents a doctorate degree research which main goal is the definition of quality-related activities for the development of Web applications. Specifically, this work intends to develop a new kind of inspection techniques: Reading Techniques for Web Applications Design. It also defines a proposal to evaluate experimentally the feasibility of such techniques. Keywords: Web Engineering; Verification, Validation and Software Inspection, Software Quality, Empirical Software Engineering.

2 Reading Techniques for Web Application Design 1. Problem Characterization Web Applications have grown quickly in their scope and extent of use, significantly affecting all aspects of our lives [1]. This growth has given birth to a new research field: Web Engineering the application of engineering principles to develop quality Web Applications [2]. According to Pastor [3], the main goal of the Web Engineering discipline is to develop correct Web Applications, where structure, functionality, navigation and user interaction have to be properly represented. Web Applications have specific issues related to the Web infrastructure. According to Fraternalli and Paolini [4], the design of Web Applications should consider three different dimensions: Structural: defining the information organization handled by the application and its relationships Navigational: representing how information can be accessed Presentation: describing how information and access can be presented to the application user Kappel [5] presents another similar classification dimension for Web applications: content, hypertext and presentation. Any of these dimensions defines different views for Web Application design. Due to these Web specific dimensions, it is necessary to define new quality assurance activities, tailored to the Web applications development process. Nowadays, several methods for developing Web Applications have been proposed and are described in the technical literature (OOHDM [6], WebML [7], WAE [8], UWE [9], OOWS [10]). The construction of conceptual models is often an important task in the development phases supported by these methods [11]. However there is a lack of specific activities to guarantee the conceptual models quality. Besides, there is no consensus on what artifacts should be deployed throughout the development process to increase quality. Thus, design defects (problems of correctness and completeness with respect to the requirements, internal consistency, or other quality attributes) can directly affect the final quality of the software [12]. According to Christodoulou et al. (apud Mendes et al. [13]), Web Applications (WA) can be divided in two categories: Web Hypermedia Applications (WHA) and Web Software Applications (WSA). A Web Hypermedia Application is a nonconventional application characterized by the authoring of information using nodes, links, anchors, access structures and its delivery over the Web. A Web Software Application represents conventional software applications that depend on the Web or use the Web s infrastructure for execution. In this research, we focus on Web Software Applications, their development process and artifacts. This paper presents a doctorate research work which main goal is the definition of quality-related activities for the development of Web Software Applications (WSA).

3 Specifically, this work intends to develop inspection techniques for Web-based systems. It also defines a proposal to experimentally evaluate the feasibility of such techniques. The text has been structured as follows. In Section 1, the motivation for this research is described. The theoretical foundation for this work can be identified in Section 2. Next, the expected contribution of this proposal is presented. In Section 4, the research methodology and its current state is described. Section 5 presents some related work on the approached topic. Finally, Section 6 describes how we intend to evaluate our results. 2. Theoretical Foundation The theoretical foundation for this research work includes two main areas: quality assurance verification and validation activities, such as software inspections, for all kinds of software applications; and Web Software Application development process into the Web Engineering discipline. WSA processes differ substantially from traditional ones [1]. Mendes et al. [14] discusses the main differences between Web and conventional software development. Besides, there are no standardized development techniques or large data sets of historical data on Web development projects [13]. Processes employed are in general ad-hoc [15]. And the quality of WSA has often been assessed in an ad-hoc way and has primarily been based on the common sense, intuition and developers expertise [11]. All development process should include quality assurance activities. Inspections are one type of these activities. Software inspection is a rigorous defect detection process that helps to improve the software quality. There are different types of inspection techniques representing different strategies for organizing people s roles and behaviors during inspection sections for keeping reviewers focused on the relevant aspects of the artifact under inspection [16]. Software inspections can be performed throughout the software lifecycle, including the software development process initial phases, such as specification requirement and design [16]. Software Reading Techniques are a kind of inspection technique that applies a series of steps for the individual analysis of a software product to achieve the understanding needed for a particular task. Reading techniques attempt to increase the effectiveness of inspections by providing procedural guidelines that can be used by individual reviewers to examine a given software artifact and identify defects [12]. Many families of reading techniques have been tailored to defect inspections, like OORTs (Object Oriented Reading Techniques) [12] that support the reading of different OO design diagrams. The OORTs consist of a family of seven reading techniques for the purpose of defect detection of high-level Object-Oriented design diagrams represented using Unified Modeling Language (UML). However OORTs don t consider specific characteristics of object oriented design of Web applications. For instance, due to the Web specific characteristics presented at Section 1, WSA have special requirements and differentiated project diagrams that are not considered by OORTs. The identification of the lack of substantial work on Web project inspection [17] and the ad-hoc nature of most Web development process reinforced the need to develop

4 reading techniques for facilitating the inspection of Web Software Applications. This research s goal is concerned with supporting the production of WSA, through useful Reading Techniques for verification and validation of Web-based systems. 3. Contribution Characterization To develop effective inspection techniques, it is necessary to characterize the existent software processes and the artifacts produced along their development phases. The first contribution of this work is the result of a literature review about Web Software Application development process. A systematic review was conducted following the method proposed in [18] and using the protocol giving at [19] as a model. The knowhow in running systematic reviews is already a contribution, since the lessons learned with planning and execution such reviews were shared in these documents: [17] and [20]. With the results of this systematic review, we are proposing a classification of the Web development processes. We are using criteria that allow a comparative study between those processes. The goal of this comparative study is to define which artifacts are commonly used or, at least, suggested to be used in a Web development process. The artifacts identification is a very relevant activity for this research, since these artifacts are candidates to apply inspection and quality-assurance techniques. The main contribution of this work is the definition of quality-related activities for Web applications development. More specifically, we intend to develop a set of reading techniques tailored to inspect artifacts of a Web Application design. After the techniques definition, we will run empirical studies aiming at the technology transfer to industry. The planned empirical studies are described at Section 6. Another expected contribution is regarding the results of the studies themselves that would add data to the empirical knowledge of Software Engineering. 4. Work Methodology and Current State of the Research Our work methodology is divided in two phases. The focus on first phase is to characterize the state of art and practice in Web applications development. The following activities have been planned to reach this objective: Execution of a systematic review about Web applications development processes and quality assurance activities in these processes; Classification of WSA processes; Characterization of the artifacts used and produced in the Web Application development; Planning and execution of a survey with specialists in Web development, to characterize the processes currently used by the Web software industry in Brazil; Comparison of the survey results and the literature review results to analyze and evaluate the elicited results. In the second phase, the objective is the development of effective quality-related activities to WSA development. Specifically, the initial objective is the development of

5 reading techniques for Web Applications design. This second phase is experimentally oriented to assure that the feasibility of the proposed techniques and activities will be evaluated by empirical studies. We intend to follow a process for technology transfer, proposed by Shull et al. [21], that follows an interactive methodology, based in empirical studies. These planned activities are presented in Section 6, because they describe the planned evaluation of our results Current State of the Research This work is now under the phase of analysis of the state of art and practice in Web application development. A systematic review about Web applications development process was executed with the use of well-defined criteria to guarantee the relevance of the research results [18], [19]. The systematic review results are presented in [17] and [20]. A classification of the Web development processes has been proposed. The Web-based artifacts list has been generated too. The next step of this research is to conduct a survey with Web specialists. 5. Related Work The Web Software Quality Area is becoming more visible. This research area focuses on how to ensure the quality in the software development process in the Web. There are works about validation and verification at earlier design phase, using Model Checking techniques [22], or different kinds of log analysis for the evaluation of Web Application quality [23]. Some tools help the WSA designer to keep the models consistent by checking the constraints defined by specific methodologies [24] [25]. In the Web Software Quality Area, there are some works about the establishment of measurement and evaluation frameworks and programs for Web Software Applications [11], [13], [26], which have to be considered in our research. However, in our systematic review, we had search for other works about Web projects inspection [17], but until this moment we didn t find any other research about activities or techniques for Web applications design inspections. We have to find out if there is any specific issue that makes the use of inspection hard in the Web development process context. Besides, there is one new work about a semi-automated infrastructure for OORTs application [27] we intend to use and to extend this infrastructure for the proposed reading techniques. 6. Result Validation The use of experimentation is necessary as a source of credible knowledge, to prove the results of the proposed techniques. This section shows perspectives of experimentation uses for the present work development and result evaluation. To minimize the problem of technology transfer from research environment to industry [28], Shull et al. [21] proposed an iterative methodology for introducing the Software Engineering processes from research centers to industry based on the use of experimental studies. This methodology has been used in Software Engineering for the development of inspection techniques and inspection tools, showing its applicability.

6 According to the proposed methodology [21], the process of Software Engineering technology transfer is composed by the following steps: feasibility studies, observational studies, case studies at software life cycle and case studies in the industry. We intend to use this methodology in the present work as follows: the feasibility studies will be accomplished as part of the initial evaluation of the proposed techniques. More specifically, we intend to perform in-vitro experiments [29] to conduct such feasibility studies. These experiments aim at compare results achieved by inspection using the proposed reading techniques with results achieved by inspection using an ad hoc approach. They also intend to compare the proposed Web techniques with other readings technique, not specific for Web-based artifacts. After evaluating the feasibility studies results, we will execute observational studies in which participants will be observed by researchers when using the reading techniques produced by this work. The observational experiments could help us to identify problems within the application of the proposed techniques in practice. If the technology proposed by this work demonstrates to be adequate through the observational studies results, a case study at life cycle will be considered, where some variables will be controlled in an organizational environment. Finally, a study in the industrial environment in the productive process of several organizations will be carried through. This environment is defined a priori in the pool of the Amazon Region Software Companies. If possible, in a final phase, we intend to aggregate the results of our experimental studies with other similar Reading Techniques results. This would allow meta-analyses that will make possible to reach more general results about Reading Techniques. According to Basili et al. [30], Common families of studies can contribute to important and relevant hypotheses that may not be suggested by individual experiments. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the reviewers and the ESE Team for the valuable comments. We also thank Professor Oscar Pastor for the suggestions and the technical material provided. The authors acknowledge CNPq and FAPEAM for the financial support to this work. References [1] Ginige, A., Murugesan, S. (2001), Web Engineering: an Introduction, IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 8, Issue: 1, pp: [2] Pressman, R. (2000), What a tangled Web we have, IEEE Software, (Jan Feb.), pp: [3] Pastor, O. (2004), Fitting the Pieces of the Web Engineering Puzzle, Invited Talk, XVIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES), Brasília, Oct. [4] Fraternalli, P., Paolini, P. (1998), A Conceptual Model and a Tool Environment for Developing More Scalable, Dynamic, and Customizable Web Applications, In EDBT 98, p.p.:

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