Agile managing of web requirements with WebSpec

Abstract

Web application development is a complex and time consuming process that involves di erent stakeholders (ranging from customers to developers); these applications have some unique characteristics like navigational access to information, sophisticated interaction features, etc. However, there have been few proposals to represent those requirements that are speci c to Web applications. Consequently, validation of requirements (e.g. in acceptance tests) is usually informal, and as a result troublesome. To overcome these problems, this PhD Thesis proposes WebSpec, a domain speci c language for specifying the most relevant and characteristic requirements of Web applications: those involving interaction and navigation. We describe WebSpec diagrams, discussing their abstraction and expressive power. As part of this work, we have created a test driven model based approach called WebTDD that gives a good framework for the language. Using the language with this approach we have test several of its features such as automatic test generation, management of changes in requirements, and improving the understanding of the diagrams through application simulation. This PhD Thesis is composed of a set of published and submitted papers. In order to write this PhD Thesis as a collection of papers, several requirements must be taken into account as stated by the University of Alicante. With regard to the content of the PhD Thesis, it must speci cally include a summary which is devoted to the description of initial hypotheses, research objectives, and the collection of publications itself, thus justifying its coherence. It should be underlined that this summary of the PhD Thesis must also include research results and nal conclusions. This summary corresponds to part I of this PhD Thesis (chapter 1 has been written in Spanish while chapter 2 is in English). This work has been partially supported by the following projects: MANTRA (GV/2011/035) from Valencia Ministry, MANTRA (GRE09-17) from the University of Alicante and by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860) project from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.