A survey of web engineering practice in small Jordanian web development firms

ABSTRACT

Web based-applications became increasingly important to all aspects of life, and most of these web applications projects run over time and budget. So there is a need to encourage practitioners to adopt best practices so as to improve the quality of the processes in use, and therefore achieve targets relating to time, budget and quality. The web development industry worldwide is dominated by a myriad of small firms. This presents a challenge in terms of determining the current practices of industry participants, and in devising improvement initiatives which are feasible for small firms. Currently, the level of adoption of best practice among web developers is unknown. To help improve the web industry, it is necessary to determine the current status of use of practices and techniques. The objective of this research is to understand the extent of web development practices currently in use. To achieve this objective, a survey of web engineering practice in small Jordanian firms was conducted. A detailed description of the survey procedures is provided in this paper. The results showed that there is a weakness in applying web engineering practices in small Jordanian web development firms.

REFERENCES

• 1: Deshpande Y, Murugesan S, Ginige A, Hansen S, Schwbe D, Gaedke M & White B "Web Engineering", Journal of Web Engineering, 1(1), 3--17, 2002
• 2: Web Engineering Home Page {http://fistserv.macarthur.uws.edu.au/san/WebEhome/
• 3: R S Pressman, Software engineering: a practitioner's approach (2nd ed.), McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1986
• 4: David Lowe, Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1999
• 5: Thomas A. Powell , David L. Jones , Dominique C. Cutts, Web site engineering: beyond Web page design, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998
• 6: Lowe, D. and Henderson-Sellers, B. Web Development: Addressing Process Differences. Cutter IT Journal.
• 7: David b. Lowe, " CLIENT NEEDS AND THE DESIGN PROCESS IN WEB PROJECTS", Journal of Mobile Multimedia, Vol. 1, No.1 (2005)
• 8: Lowe, D. and Henderson-Sellers, B., Impacts on the development process of differences between web systems and conventional software systems. in SSGRR 2001: International Conference on Advances in Infrastructure for Electronic Business, Science, and Education on the Internet, (L'Aquila, Italy, 2001), Scuola Superiore Guglielmo Reiss Romoli, 21.
• 9: Mohamed E. Fayad , Mauri Laitinen , Robert P. Ward, Thinking objectively: software engineering in the small, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.3, p.115-118, March 2000 [doi>10.1145/330534.330555]
• 10: www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/93.reports/93.tr.024.html
• 11: 1997 SOFTWARE BEST PRACTICE QUESTIONNAIRE. ESI-1997-CODE/VERSION, www2.umassd.edu/swpi/esi/trsbpqaor3.pdf

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.0 General
          Subjects: Standards

General Terms:
Documentation, Management, Standardization

Keywords:
small firms, software engineering, software tools, web engineering, web-based applications