Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems q Fernando Molina * , Ambrosio Toval Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Informatics and Systems, University of Murcia, Facultad de Informática, Campus de Espinardo, 30100 Murcia, Spain article info Article history: Received 22 September 2008 Received in revised form 19 November 2008 Accepted 19 January 2009 Available online 10 April 2009 Keywords: Web engineering Requirements metamodelling Usability evaluation Software quality abstract In recent years, Web Engineering development projects have grown increasingly complex for and critical to the smooth running of organizations. However, recent studies reveal that a high percentage of these projects fail to attain the quality parameters required by stakeholders. The inadequate consideration of requirements management activities together with the absence of attention to the elicitation and evalu- ation of requirements and metrics related to certain quality attributes which are of special importance in this kind of systems, such as usability, have proved to be some of the main causes of this failure. This paper attempts to reduce some of the quality failures detected in Web Engineering development projects by proposing the consideration and evaluation of quality attributes from early stages of the development process. The presented approach therefore commences with a reinforcement of the requirements related activities in this discipline, which is carried out by using a requirements metamodel. Once these require- ments have been identified, the approach focuses on the extension of the conceptual models used by Web Engineering methodologies with the aim of allowing the explicit consideration of usability requirements along with the evaluation of quality metrics during the design of the system. An example of an applica- tion illustrating how the approach can be used, along with the automatic support which was developed for it, are also shown. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The development of Web Information Systems (WIS) has under- gone an exponential growth in the last decade. Initially, these sys- tems were used only as a means to disseminate information. However, their complexity has recently increased, they are present in numerous domains being used by millions of users around the world and they have become critical systems for the business strat- egies of many organizations [36]. This growth, together with some particular features that make WIS development projects different from other software developments [36], have compelled the orga- nizations to adapt their software development processes to deal with the idiosyncrasy of WIS [35]. Moreover, as a result of its awareness of such difficulties, the WIS research community has developed numerous techniques, tools and methodologies within the scope of a new discipline, called Web Engineering (WE), which promotes the establishment and use of sound scientific, engineer- ing and management principles, and disciplined and systematic approaches for the development, deployment and maintenance of web-based systems [19]. However, as various surveys and research publications reveal [31,15], the development of this kind of systems is not exempt from errors and the WIS finally developed, regardless of their scope (busi- ness, engineering, scientific, etc.), do not always satisfy the quality requirements demanded by their users. These studies highlight that the top five problem areas of large-scale WE projects are (1) failure to meet business needs (84%), (2) project schedule delays (79%), (3) budget overrun (63%), (4) lack of required functionality (53%) and (5) poor quality of deliverables (52%). In fact these problems, far from being new, are quite similar to those encountered in tradi- tional Software Engineering, in which it has already been proved [9,24] that they are often a symptom of an inadequate management of the tasks related to the requirements workflow of the project. It is therefore surprising that, in spite of this reality, organiza- tions which carry out the WIS projects or WE methodologies cur- rently used in industry (such as e.g. WebML [8], UWE [33] or OO-H [21]), are still not, to the best of our knowledge, paying the necessary amount of attention to requirements management activ- ities in WIS projects. In fact, various surveys [16,17] reveal that WE methodologies are still mostly focused on the design workflow of web applications, while the requirements workflow is, at best, only tangentially tackled. Another survey carried out by Lang and Fitzgerald [35] over 160 organizations that develop web-based 0965-9978/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.advengsoft.2009.01.018 q Partially supported by the projects DEDALO (TIN2006-15175-C05-03) and the CALIPSO thematic network (TIN2005-24055-E), from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and MELISA-GREIS (PAC08-0142-335). The first author is partially funded by the Fundación Séneca (Región de Murcia). * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 868 884642/03; fax: +34 868 88 4151. E-mail addresses: fmolina@um.es (F. Molina), atoval@um.es (A. Toval). Advances in Engineering Software 40 (2009) 1306–1317 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advances in Engineering Software journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/advengsoft