Software Engineering Assignment -
Title: A Web Site Investigation and Analysis
Purposes:
- To investigate and analyse a web site from the Web engineering point of view;
- To prepare for Assignment 2 - a Web application design project.
Specification: The World Wide Web and the Internet that supports it have become integral to our daily life in this information society, and many applications have been developed on the Web. Therefore, it is necessary to assess web applications from the Web engineering point of view, and analyze whether these applications were properly designed for their original purposes and functions. The assessment and analysis enable the developers to improve existing Web systems or to develop a new well-designed Web system.
This assignment provides you with such an opportunity that you can use the principles and methods learnt from this unit to analyze a Web site. Your investigation and analysis results will be the base of your assignment 2 where you are required to improve an existing Web site or design a new Web site based on your analysis results in this assignment.
In this assignment, you can choose and investigate a Web site/sub-site you are interested in. However, the chosen Web site/sub-site must contain main web application elements, such as information/content, queries, and interactive operations/functionalities between users and the application. Some examples of this kind of WebApps are on-line booking (flight ticket, accommodation etc.) and on-line purchase. You can also find many other WebApp examples by yourself.
In other words, a Web site/sub-site that only provides static information/content is not suitable for this assignment. If the Web site you are going to investigate is big, you can choose a sub-site for this assignment. But the chosen sub-site still needs to have those web application elements.
NOTE: A well-designed Web site/sub-site MUST NOT be selected for this assignment! This is because the Web site/sub-site you are analyzing in this assignment will be the one you are going to improve or redesign in assignment-2. A well-designed Web site provides you with few chances and little room of applying your analysis and design skills to a real Web application. That is not what we expect for this unit.
Your assignment work should cover the following parts which are also the requirements and marking criteria of this assignment.
1. A properly chosen Web site/sub-site.
The chosen Web site or sub-site should be for Web based applications which contain the main application elements mentioned above. In general, personal web sites and those web sites that only provide static information/content are not suitable for this assignment.
A well-designed Web-site should NOT be selected either for the reasons in the above note.
Guideline while you select the web page. Your selected web site will require following types of updates that you need to address in proposed solution for assignment.
Areas of improvement in your selected website:
i. Website will require to update the content. This content could be both static and dynamic content. The dynamic content may require new user interactions and require to update the content model and process model of web site.
ii. Update of user interactions will require an update for GUI interface. This may need to update of process model
iii. Web site will require to update the navigation structure and presentation
iv. Update of specific features (at least three) that address items (A to C). Addition of features may require update in content, user interaction, process and navigation model.
For the chosen Web site or sub-site, you are required to give
the URL;
a snapshot of the home page;
a brief introduction to the Web site,
- the background of the Web site/sub-site such as why it was developed (business needs);
- the objectives of the Web applications; and
- major features and functions that realize the objectives using some diagrams or figures is preferable.
The reasons why it is chosen for investigation and analysis.
- Identify and describe the major services in plain language that will improve the web site and benefit its owners and users.
- This should fall under above areas. There should be at least three proposed major services.
2. Web site users, Interaction model and use-case analysis.
Mainly focuses on the possible users of the Web applications and their main interactions with the Web site/sub-site.
The requirements of this analysis are:
- Prepare user hierarchical diagrams.
- for each kind of user (actor), you are required to investigate the use- cases, i.e. in how many ways the actor interacts with the Web applications and what the interactions are. For this purpose, if the chosen Web site/sub-site has functions/operations for registered members, you had better have an account for accessing these functions.
- Present those use cases in a use case diagram
- For each use case, present Use case description (at least three use cases from selected services):
- Also provide activity diagrams for corresponding use cases.
- Write the high level requirements for users, rationale and Fit criterion (if applicable). These will be proposed requirements, not what are existing there. Requirements at this stage have scope of product feature type (at least four).
3. Web site content and content relationship analysis.
Contents are pre-existing information for end-users. A content object might be a textual description of a product, an action photograph, an animated representation, or a short video and audio. In this analysis, you are required to
- Identify the main content objects of the Web application, and their relationships.
- draw a data tree (refer to the textbook or lecture notes).
- Write the high level content requirements, rationale and Fit criterion (if applicable). These will be proposed requirement, not what are existing there. Requirements at this stage have scope of product feature type (at least three).
4. Navigation analysis.
Navigations establish proper links between content objects and among the functions that provide user-required capabilities. The main questions you might ask when you conduct navigation analysis can be found in the section "How Do We Analyze Navigational Requirements" of chapter 7 in the textbook (page 161-162) or in the lecture notes. In this analysis, you should
- identify the navigation structures of the Web site/sub-site.
- analyze the navigation by answering the questions mentioned above.
- Write the high level navigation requirements, rationale and Fit criterion (if applicable). These will be proposed requirement, not what are existing there. Requirements at this stage have scope of product feature type (at least three).
5. Prepare initial product backlog:
Identify the epics and write the epics in appropriate format through the above steps in the initial product backlog. Each epic can be considered as a service proposed by the web site.
At least three epics based on above three models and each Epic should be related to one of the models mentioned above).
Specify the model for each epic and explain why it does fall in this category
These epics should be identified such that it improves the web site, not the existing epics in the web site.
List the product features under each epic. These are already identified in the requirements, but now categorizing under Epics.
Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar