Alejandra Garrido

Design reuse in hypermedia applications development

In this paper we discuss the use of design patterns for the process of building hypermedia applications. The idea of design patterns has been recently developed, and rapidly spread outside the object-oriented community to a general audience of software developers. By using patterns it is not only possible to document design experience with a very simple and comprehensible format, but also reuse the same experience several times for different applications. We argue that the hypermedia community will take a vital step towards better designs of hypermedia applications and systems by developing a pattern language for that domain.

Refactoring for Usability in Web Applications

Refactoring a Web applications design structure can improve its usability. Characterizing each refactoring according to the usability factor it improves and the bad usability smells it targets can further clarify its intent.

A framework for extending object-oriented applications with hypermedia functionality

Abstract A core set of navigational aspects may be found by extracting the key features of hypermedia applications. Incorporated to an information system (IS), they may increase its utility and usability.1 This type of extension of an IS is called “The Hypertext Functionality Approach’12 and it may be done in different ways. In this paper we present a novel approach to add navigational features into object-oriented (OO) applications: by using the application model as the basis for the hypermedia model and placing the navigational features in a different layer, allowing to augment the application functionality without polluting the base model. The navigational features were included as components of an OO framework, and were defined by abstracting the major concepts of current hypermedia design models. The major goal of this approach is the seamless integration of the applications behaviour with main characteristics of hypermedia. This results in a hybrid application that may be considered either as an OO...

Personalized Web Accessibility using Client-Side Refactoring

According to W3C accessibility standards, most Web applications are neither accessible nor usable for people with disabilities. Developers often solve this problem by building separate accessible applications, but these applications are seldom usable and typically offer less functionality than the original. Another common solution is to maintain a single application, but create an accessible view by applying on-the-fly transformations to each requested page-a solution that rarely suits all audiences. A third solution is described here: let users improve Web accessibility in their client browsers through interface refactorings, which offer many customized, accessible views of a single application.

Model Refactoring in Web Applications

Refactoring has been growing in importance with recent software engineering approaches, particularly agile methodologies, which promote continuous improvement of an applications code and design. Web applications are especially suitable for refactoring because of their rapid development and continuous evolution. Refactoring is about applying transformations that preserve program behavior. Code refactorings apply transformations to the source code while model refactorings apply to design models, both with the purpose of increasing internal qualities like maintainability and extensibility. In this paper we propose Web model refactorings as transformations that apply to the design models of a Web application. Particularly, we define refactorings on the navigation and presentation models, and present examples. Since changing these models impacts on what the user perceives, the intent of Web model refactorings is to improve external qualities like usability. They may also help to introduce Web patterns in a Web application.

Incremental quality improvement in web applications using web model refactoring

Web applications must be usable and accessible; besides, they evolve at a fast pace and it is difficult to sustain a high degree of external quality. Agile methods and continuous refactoring are well-suited for the rapid development of Web applications since they particularly support continuous evolution. However, the purpose of traditional refactorings is to improve internal quality, like maintainability of design and code, rather than usability of the application. We have defined Web model refactorings as transformations on the navigation and presentation models of a Web application. In this paper, we demonstrate how Web model refactorings can improve the usability of a Web application by using a mature quality evaluation approach (WebQEM) to assess the impact of refactoring on some defined attributes of a Web product entity. We present a case study showing how a shopping cart in an e-commerce site can improve its usability by applying Web model refactorings.

Automatic detection of usability smells in web applications

Abstract Usability assessment of web applications continues to be an expensive and often neglected practice. While large companies are able to spare resources for studying and improving usability in their products, smaller businesses often divert theirs in other aspects. To help these cases, researches have devised automatic approaches for user interaction analysis, and there are commercial services that offer automated usability statistics at relatively low fees. However, most existing approaches still fall short in specifying the usability problems concretely enough to identify and suggest solutions. In this work we describe usability smells of user interaction, i.e., hints of usability problems on running web applications, and the process in which they can be identified by analyzing user interaction events. We also describe USF, the tool that implements the process in a fully automated way with minimum setup effort. USF analyses user interaction events on-the-fly, discovers usability smells and reports them together with a concrete solution in terms of a usability refactoring, providing usability advice for deployed web applications.

Embracing the C preprocessor during refactoring

C preprocessor directives are heavily used in C programs because they provide useful and even necessary additions to the C language. However, they are usually executed and discarded before any analysis is applied on C programs. In refactoring, preprocessor directives must be preserved through the whole process of parsing, analysis and transformation to retain editable yet correct source code. We propose a new preprocessing approach and special program representations that allow a program to be analyzed and transformed without losing its preprocessor directives, but treating them as first‐class program entities. These representations are essential for a correct refactoring tool. We also describe the challenges that preprocessor directives bring to refactoring and how the program representations that we propose solve those challenges. Finally, we give details of two refactorings and present some case studies with our successfully applied solution. Copyright

Assessing refactorings for usability in e-commerce applications

Refactoring has been reported as a helpful technique to systematically improve non-functional attributes of software. This paper evaluates the relevance of refactoring for improving usability on web applications. We conducted an experiment with two replications at different locations, with subjects of different profiles. Objects chosen for the experiment were two e-commerce applications that exhibit common business processes in today’s web usage. Through the experiment we found that half of the studied refactorings cause a significant improvement in usability. The rest of the refactorings required a post-hoc analysis in which we considered aspects like user expertise in the interaction with web applications or type of application. We conclude that, when improving quality in use, the success of the refactoring process depends on several factors, including the type of software system, context and users. We have analyzed all these aspects, which developers must consider for a better decision support at the time of prioritizing improvements and outweighing effort.

Business processes refactoring to improve usability in E-commerce applications

Refactoring is a technique that applies step-by-step transformations intended to improve the quality of software while preserving its behavior. It represents an essential activity in today’s software lifecycle and a powerful tool against software decay. Software decay, however, is not only about code becoming legacy, but it is also about systems becoming less usable compared to competitor solutions adopting new designs and new technologies. If we narrow the focus on e-commerce systems, the role of usability becomes essential: higher usability is in fact a requirement to win the market competition and to retain customers from turning to other choices. One reason why an e-commerce application can start suffering from poor usability is because of its business processes (BPs) becoming difficult to access, complicated to execute, and, overall, offering a poor user experience. In this paper we argue that refactoring can be a key solution for this kind of usability issues. In particular, we propose a catalog of refactorings as a means to systematically identify and address lack of usability in the BPs of an e-commerce application, and to seize opportunities for usability improvement. To make the presentation concrete and to provide evidence of the benefits that applying our refactorings can bring, we present a number of examples with reference to well-known e-commerce websites.