Time-quality metric model for quality measurement of web-based systems

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. The dramatic growth of e-commerce and the reliance of organizations’ success on quality of their Web systems have required the need for building high quality Web-based applications with minimum time and effort. Therefore, Web application’s quality measurements and metrics are becoming increasingly important. Although many quality metric models for Webbased applications have been proposed, they introduced a set of (relatively) ambiguous guidelines and rules and were not validated theoretically and empirically. We propose a Time-Quality metric model for Web-based systems quality measurement that: (1) is based on a set of Web quality characteristics defined by the ISO 9126 standard, (2) uses the percentage contribution of each characteristic (i.e., the importance weight of each characteristic) to determine the web quality, and (3) considers the impact of development time (using the WebMo model as measurement for Web system development time) on quality of a Web-based system. The model consists of two measurement phases: first the percentage contribution of each quality characteristic and the development time for a Web system are initially estimated using predefined formulas, and then same measurements are carried out after the system is built. The quality of the developed system is then adjusted by the development time factor. We argue that a Web-based quality measurement model should consider the development time as a key impact on the quality of Web systems, in addition to a set of essential quality characteristics. The model is used to evaluate a real-world Web application example, which illustrates its applicability. The example shows how the total quality of the Web system is affected. Although the model quantifies a set of quality characteristics and introduced mathematical formulas for measuring quality of Web applications, it suffers from subjectivity used in evaluating quality characteristics, which could lead to imprecision in measurement. Further, it has to consider other measurement quality factors, such as consumption of different resources that a Web application could interact with during run-time. The noticed limitations are topics of our ongoing and future work.