A Survey of Requirements Specification in Model-Driven Development of Web Applications

Model-driven development has become more and more important in the last few years. In the context of web application development, many web Engineering methods that propose model-driven development processes have appeared. However, earlier stages of these processes are seldom considered and few of these methods rigorously face the problems of specifying web application requirements and translating them into the proper conceptual model. However, it is widely recognized that requirements engineering activities are essential to obtain quality software products. This article surveys Model-driven web engineering methods in a comparative study and analyzes the techniques proposed for specifying functional, data and navigational requirements as well as the mechanisms provided for automatically translating these requirements into conceptual models. Our main goal is to provide a critical view of the support that is provided by these methods for handling web application requirements in order to show their current limitations and strengths.