An MDA approach for goal-oriented requirement analysis in Web engineering

Abstract

Web designers usually ignore how to model real user expectations and goals, mainly due to the large and heterogeneous audience of the Web. This fact leads to websites which are difficult to comprehend by visitors and complex to maintain by designers. In order to ameliorate this scenario, an approach for using the i* modeling framework in Web engineering has been developed in this paper. Furthermore, due to the fact that most of the existing Web engineering approaches do not consider how to derive conceptual models of the Web application from requirements analysis we also propose the use of MDA (Model Driven Architecture) in Web engineering for: (i) the definition of the requirements of a Web application in a Computational Independent Model (CIM), (ii) the description of Platform Independent Models (PIMs), and (iii) the definition of a set of QVT (Query/View/Transformation) transformations for the derivation of PIMs from requirements specification (CIM), thus to enable the automatic generation of Web applications. Finally, we include a sample of our approach in order to show its applicability and we describe a prototype tool as a proof of concept of our research.