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Towards improving the navigability of Web applications: a model-driven approach

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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Navigability in use, defined as the efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with which a user navigates through the system in order to fulfil her goals under specific conditions, has a definite impact on the overall success of Web applications. This quality attribute can be measured based on the navigational model (NM) provided by Web engineering (WE) methodologies. Most of the measures currently defined for NMs are tightly coupled with particular WE methodologies, however. Furthermore, modifications to the design of the NM, carried out with the aim of improving navigability, are performed manually. Both practices have seriously hampered the reusability and adoption of proposed navigability measures and improvement techniques. In this paper, we present a Model-Driven Engineering approach to solving these problems. On the one hand, we propose a generic approach for the definition of navigability measurement models that can be integrated into any WE methodology. On the other hand, we present a model-driven improvement process for the NM design that incurs no increase in costs or in time-to-market of Web applications. This process is divided into two phases: evaluation (i.e. assessment of the model through objective measures) and evolution (i.e. transformation of the model when the measurement results do not fall inside the boundaries set by certain quality decision criteria that have been defined previously).

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Acknowledgements

Research funding was obtained from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant PR2006-0374 for University Teaching Staff Stages at foreign Universities, projects MEC-FEDER (TIN2004-03145), ESFINGE (TIN2006-15175-C05-05), METASIGN (TIN2004-00779) and DSDM (TIN2005-25866-E)). The research reported on in this paper is also part of the DADASMECA project (GV05/220), financed by the Valencia Government, and the DADS (PBC-05-012-2) and the DIMENSIONS (PBC-05-012-1) projects, financed by the Regional Science and Technology Ministry of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).

We would like to thank Silvia Abrahao (Valencia University of Technology) for her insightful comments on the mapping between OO-H and OOWS constructs.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and Computing Systems, Web Engineering and Database Research Group, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Cristina Cachero Castro & Santiago Meliá

  2. Computer Science Department, ALARCOS Research Group, University of Castilla la Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Marcela Genero & Coral Calero

  3. Faculty of Economic and Applied Economic Sciences, Universiteit Gent, Gent, Belgium

    Geert Poels

Authors
  1. Cristina Cachero Castro
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  2. Santiago Meliá
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  3. Marcela Genero
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  4. Geert Poels
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  5. Coral Calero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Cachero Castro.

Appendices

Appendix A: QVT-relation specification of UPT transformations

In Table A1, we present the QVT-Relation specification that is automatically generated from the UPT specification of the three rules that implement the DCNM measure in the context of OO-H (see Figure 12, 13 and 14).

Table ta1 QVT-relation specification of CheckDCNM rule
Full size table

As an example, the QVT-Relation corresponding to Figure 12 is translated into a top relation block in Table A1. Inside this block, each branch of the relation is preceded by their nature (checkonly, enforceable). Inside each branch, we find a set of either simple pairs attribute-value or complex structures that are further decomposed until reaching the attribute-value level of detail. Last, when and where clauses are additional blocks of the QVT-Relation specification.

Appendix B: Java code corresponding to the DefineNewTraversalLink transformation

In order to illustrate the operationalization of the UPT transformations in the WebSA tool, in Table B1 we present the Java Code, automatically generated by the WebSA Tool, corresponding to the DefineNewTraversalLink Transformation.

Table tb1 Java code corresponding to the DefineNewTraversalLink transformation
Full size table

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Cachero Castro, C., Meliá, S., Genero, M. et al. Towards improving the navigability of Web applications: a model-driven approach. Eur J Inf Syst 16, 420–447 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000690

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