Towards efficient web engineering approaches through flexible process models

After more than a decade of web developments and some deafening fiascos, it has become clear that it is not possible to face the development of large scale web systems without following a systematic and well-defined process to guarantee quality, measurability, maintainability and reusability. There are a number of hypermedia/web engineering methods that provide mechanisms to specify the product requirements, including those concerning structure, navigation, interaction, presentation and access. But apart from product requirements there are also process requirements which in the web arena are constantly changing. Hence, to be put in practice without disturbing the project goals nor compromising its success, methods have to rely on empirical and flexible process models that can be easily adapted to fit process requirements. Little attention has been paid to the process model in most hypermedia/web methods which usually apply a classical iterative process based on the use of prototypes that are tested with users. In this paper we describe how we did apply the ADM web engineering method following a flexible star life cycle in the context of a specific web project highlighting the main benefits of this approach. In particular we will describe the different cycles applied in the ARCE project, illustrating the application of a usability engineering life cycle in a real case.