Quick Prototyping of Web Applications ⋆ Lukasz Olek, Bartosz Michalik, Jerzy Nawrocki, Miroslaw Ochodek Poznań University of Technology, Institute of Computing Science, ul. Piotrowo 3A, 60-965 Poznań, Poland {Lukasz.Olek, Bartosz.Michalik, Jerzy.Nawrocki, Miroslaw.Ochodek}@cs.put.poznan.pl Abstract. Web applications are getting more and more complex. Be- cause of this, effective communication with prospective end user is essen- tial. In the paper the concept of quick prototyping of web applications is presented and early experience with implementation of the concept is discussed. This approach assumes that requirements are written in form of use cases supplemented with screen designs. Quick prototype is generated automatically from these artifacts. 1 Introduction Web applications are getting more and more complex. They serve as a basis for e- governance, enterprise content management etc. (it is predicted that in 2008 the ECM market will amount to $3.9 billion [8]). Designing such complex and inno- vative applications require good communication with end-users at requirements elicitation stage. It is well-known that end-user feedback is very important, so experts suggest to use prototyping [21,20,4] to enhance this feedback. However, in constantly changing business environment, a prototype becomes additional artifact that requires maintenance and involves additional costs. In Quick Prototyping we generate a mockup from use cases and screen de- signs. Such choice seems to be reasonable, since most projects use scenarios or use cases to write requirements (>50%) and user interfaces designs to visualize future system (>65%) [15]. The prototype is “quick" as it can be automatically generated from the requirements specification. It is also “cheap" as after chang- ing requirements you can easily regenerate the mockup. Mockup is a simple web application that presents use cases together with screen designs attached to each step. An end user can animate the use cases to understand the application under development and can perform a review (the prototype collects feedback from a number of end-users and presents reports). Since we generate a Mockup automatically, the requirements must be written using a semi-formalized model, understandable by a computer. This rises two main questions that are answered in this paper: ⋆ This research has been financially supported by the Ministry of Scientific Research and Information Technology grant N516 001 31/0269.