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Vol.4 No.4 December 1,
2005
Editorial
(pp281-282)
G-J Houben
Research articles:
Agile Web Engineering (AWE) Process: Perceptions within a Fortune 500
Financial Services Company (pp283-312)
A. McDonald and R. Welland
The Agile Web Engineering (AWE)
Process was developed during 2001 to address the challenges that we
believe new effective Web development processes will have to tackle. In
October 2001, Andrew McDonald started a one year Ph.D. Internship with a
Fortune 500 Global Financial Services Company with the goal of exploring
the use of AWE in a commercial environment. In this paper we discuss the
results of two surveys within the company. First, a company sponsored
review of the current in-house software development process, before
AWE’s first commercial pilot. Second, a survey of development and line
management staff in both the business and the technology sectors, after
AWE’s first commercial pilot.
The initial survey established how a large company,
with extensive experience of software development, was coping with the
changing demands of developing Web-based applications and other software
projects where time-to-market pressures are a major driver. After
introducing the principles of an agile approach to software development
we carried out a successful pilot using AWE on a retail Internet banking
application, significantly increasing end-user task completion rates. We
then carried out a further survey to assess company stakeholders’
impressions of AWE. Both the
pre- and post-AWE Pilot surveys strongly suggest that the company is
trying to cope with Web Engineering process challenges similar to those
facing other organisations. The post-AWE pilot survey indicates that the
AWE process is better suited and more capable as a Web Engineering
process than the current in-house company process. The post-AWE Pilot
also describes the primary hurdles encountered to getting AWE officially
adopted within the company, these include: need for a cultural change
before agile processes, including AWE, could be successfully adopted;
inertia and the company’s desire to have a one-size fits all process
approach as opposed to processes specific to different categories of
software development. We validated our findings using Boehm and
Turner’s ‘home grounds’ analysis to identify the company’s sweet-spot in
the process spectrum. Using home grounds analysis we identify that
plan-driven processes rather than agile processes are better suited to
typical projects within the company. However, home grounds analysis and
both our surveys strongly indicate that better results can be achieved
in Web Engineering projects within the company, by using an agile
process approach, such as AWE, specifically focused on Web-based
application development.
Impacts of Web Systems on their Domain (pp313-338)
N. Yusop, D. Lowe, and D.
Zowghi
In web systems development, the
business environment and processes not only drive the identification of
system needs, but this environment and processes are also in turn
fundamentally changed by the introduction or evolution of the system.
This means that a web system during development will be highly volatile
with a complex set of inter-dependencies with the various domain
characteristics. We report on a detailed analysis of the literature
related to these dependencies, and in particular the impacts that a Web
system has on its environment. We also present a framework that
encapsulates the dimensions of impact on both the internal and external
business environment. From this analysis we show how different facets
of the domain of a system are impacted in different ways. As the scale
and immediacy of these impacts increase we need to become more
predictive of these impacts in taking them into account during the
development. Our analysis will provide organisations with the basis for
moving towards this increased level of predictiveness. This analysis
will also provide the organisations with a framework for developing
strategies for joint development of system and business processes.
Server Enforced Program Safety for Web Applications (pp229-371)
H. Detmold, K. Falkner, D.S.
Munro, T. Olds, R. Morrison, and S. Norcross
As Web application development evolves from initial {\it
ad hoc} approaches to large scale Web engineering, it is increasingly
important to adopt systematic approaches to ensuring safety properties
of Web applications. In particular, engineers constructing Web
applications should be provided with at least the same guarantees of
static safety as in preceding development paradigms; the current absence
of such guarantees leads to Web application users being forced to endure
failure modes that would never be accepted from conventional
applications. We observe that much is known about program
safety in the traditional software development domain. Based on this
observation, we contend that Web engineering should adopt an
evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to program safety. That
is, existing solutions from conventional development should be evolved
to match the exigencies of the Web engineering context, rather than
engendering solutions that are wholly new. With this
evolutionary approach in mind, we introduce a categorisation of the
problem area into four major safety properties, each related by analogy
to a problem in the conventional development paradigm. Further, we
observe that in the Web context, these properties are interrelated, and
hence adopt an integrated model for their enforcement. Based on this
integrated model, we demonstrate an approach to Web application safety
that is both simpler and more powerful than previous, non-integrated,
approaches. In contrast to previous systems, our approach as implemented
in our WebStore application server achieves the safety goals without
recourse to new and unfamiliar programming constructs. Finally, WebStone
benchmark results comparing our server to existing mainstream Web
application development platforms demonstrate that it provides
acceptable performance for a wide range of Web applications.
Author Index (pp372-372)
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