© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Assessing a Web Engineering Method in Practice: a Preliminary Analysis for Personal Genomics Portals Ana Rosa Guzman 1 , Victoria López 1 , Francisco Valverde 1 , Sven Casteleyn 1 , Oscar Pastor 1 1 Centro de Investigación en Métodos de Producción de Software, Universitat Politècnica de València Camino de Vera S/N, 46022 Valencia, Spain {arguzman, vlopez, fvalverde, sven.casteleyn, opastor}@pros.upv.es Abstract. Over fifteen years of academic research in Web Engineering resulted in sound engineering principles and full-fledged design methods for Web appli- cations. Nevertheless, the community suffers a lack of industrial adoption and a lack of validation of the methods in realistically sized modern Web applica- tions. This paper addresses this hiatus and presents an experience report on the application of OOWS 2.0, a state-of-the-art Web engineering method, on two real-life complex Web applications in the Personal Genomics field. Based on this analysis, we verify the technical completeness of the method, gather infor- mation about its use, identify shortcomings and present some improvements. Keywords: Web Engineering, Model-driven Engineering, Personal Genomics 1 Introduction Over the past fifteen years, research in Web Engineering explored methods and tech- niques to develop Web applications in a sound and systematic way. Several so called Web Engineering methods have been established, and hundreds of scientific publica- tions have been dedicated to them. These methods generally follow the model-driven development paradigm, and discern similar models and modeling abstractions tack- ling data, navigation and interaction and presentation concerns. Some of the best- known methods include WebML [1], OOHDM [2], OOH [3], WSDM [4] and OOWS [5]. Despite these efforts, there is a lack of validation and evaluation research. Few ex- perience reports are available [6] and industrial adoption is minimal or totally miss- ing. An extensive empirical study carried out by Garzotto et al. [7] reveals that many factors contribute to the lack of adoption, among which are the lack of awareness of web engineering methods, lack of consideration of non-functional requirements and lack of tool support. As a result, it is unclear how the Web engineering methods would perform in a real-world industrial setting, where the requirements, size and complexity of Web systems are of a different order of magnitude than the academic proof-of-concepts that are usually reported