A Survey of Web Engineering in Practice

During October, November and December 2000, we conducted interviews with a number of people within organisations in the United Kingdom who are involved in the development of Web-based applications. The goals of the survey were to identify more clearly the major issues facing the development of Web-based systems, and to see which, if any, traditional software engineering practices and techniques were being successfully applied. Fifteen interviewees from seven different organisations took part in the survey. This report details the background and results of our survey, and the conclusions that can be drawn about the practice of Web Engineering. We also discuss the major characteristics that describe Web-based application development, and the issues that a successful Web engineering process will have to address. Foreword The following report details the results of a survey of Web Engineering teams during October, November and December 2000. The report comprises the following sections. The first section is essentially a copy of a draft paper that has been accepted for the Web Engineering Workshop at WWW10. This summarises the results of the survey and discussed their significance. The following three sections describe the survey and detail the design, raw results and analysis for each of our three classifications of Web development organisations: Contractors, Outsourcers and In-house. The three appendices contain copies of the questionnaires used for each of these three classifications of Web development organisations. Our objective in publishing this technical report is make the detailed survey results, upon which our paper is based, available to a wider audience. We also hope that perhaps some other research group might carry out a similar survey elsewhere for comparison.