Investigating the Feasibility of a Specification and Quality Assessment Approach Suitable for Web Functional Requirements

Despite the importance of assure quality of Web applications for their use by the contemporary society, just a few Web development methods offer mechanisms to support such quality in the final product. Besides, when quality concern is present, it is usually concerned with the design models and implementation issues. With some risk, all of them assume the requirements specification is ready and good enough to effectively support the design models generation and consequent implementation. However, the quality of the requirements can affect software design and implementation. Therefore, this paper investigates an approach to support the specification and quality assurance of functional requirements concerned with Web applications. This approach makes use of stereotyped UML activity diagrams to support functional requirements specification. A use case tool and a checklist based inspection technique complement it. The results of two experimental studies indicated its feasibility on supporting the specification of requirements for real web applications. It has been observed through the reduction of the specification time and number of defects in activity diagrams (and their corresponding use cases) specified for an industrial large scale Web-based information system when compared with ad-hoc specification approaches.