Assessment of portlet quality: Collecting real experience

Owing to the current complexity of portals, vendors of portal frameworks are striving to bring component-based development to the Web: ‘portlets’. Portal users find the portal screen split into a number of sections, each containing separate ‘portlets’, that run or link to the application elements to which the particular user has the appropriate access rights. Taking into account that the success of a portal depends on customers using it and then returning to it, its quality must be assured. If the quality of a portal is to be guaranteed, the first step is to ensure that the portal is built with portlets which have a “good” quality level. Bearing all this in mind, this paper has set as its objective the development of a portlet quality model which includes different measures and which is able to determine the quality level of a specific portlet. In addition, the model has been applied to a concrete portlet: as a result, the quality level for the different characteristics that make up the portlet quality model has been assessed.