Requirements Models as First Class Entities in Model-Driven Web Engineering

The relevance of a detailed and precise specification of the requirements is well known; it helps to achieve an agreement with the customer on software functionality, user friendliness and priorities in the development process. However, in practice, modeling of requirements is avoided in many projects, in particular in the Web domain, mainly due to short time-to-market. The objective of this work is to make requirements modeling more attractive providing a win-win situation. On the one hand such models are used to improve the developer-customer communication and on the other hand to generate draft design models, which can be used in further steps of a model-driven development approach, and therefore reduce the developers’ efforts. We concretize the approach presenting a domain specific modeling language defined as an extension of the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) profile and a set of model transformations defined to generate the content, navigation and presentation models of web applications. A social network application is used to illustrate UWE requirements and design models.