What is meant by analysis for web applications?

Web sites are complex and dynamic in nature. Web application analysis concentrates on three important criteria:
- information or content that is presented.
- functions that are to be performed for end user.
- behaviors of web applications.

Analysis of web applications is mainly done by web engineers, non technical content developers and stakeholders. Analysis modeling is important because it enables a web engineering team to develop a concrete model of web application requirements. It helps to define fundamental aspects of problem. There are four important aspects that analysis modeling focus:
- Content analysis identifies content classed and collaborations.
- Interaction analysis describes user interaction, navigation and system behaviors occurring as a consequence.
- Function analysis defines web application functions performed for user and sequence of processing.
- Configuration analysis identifies the operational environment in which a web application resides.

Analysis modeling should be done by web applications when the following conditions are met:
- web application is large or complex.
- number of stakeholder is large.
- number of web engineers is large.
- goals and objectives for web application will effect the business.
- success of web application will have strong affect on the success of business.

What comprises the Web Engineering Team?

For a successful web application project, there is a need for a successful web engineering team. Web engineering teams can be organized in the same manner as traditional software team, however, players and their roles are quite different.

The roles that people play in a web engineering team are:

- Content is the most important part of web applications. So, role of content developer or provider focus on the generation of content.
- The content developed should be organized. Web publisher is a person who acts as a mediator between the technical person and non technical content developer.
- Web engineer is responsible for activities like requirements elicitation, analysis modeling, architectural, navigational and interface design, web application implementation and testing. He should be thorough in technologies as well.
- Business domain experts take care of questions related to business goals, objectives and requirements associated with a web application.
- Support specialist is a person whose responsibility is to continue with web application support. All the corrections, adaptations and enhancements are taken care by a support specialist.
- Administrator is responsible for the day to day activity of a web application which also includes development and implementation of policies, support procedures, security rights, handling web traffic etc.

In order to build a team for web application:
- team guidelines are established which includes expectations from team member, how problems are dealt and what methods are used to improve the effectiveness.
- strong leadership.
- team motivation and respect for individual talents.
- commitment from every team member is necessary.
- momentum should be maintained.

Overview of analysis for Web Applications

Web application analysis focuses on the information or content that is to be presented, the functions that are to be performed for the end user and behaviors that a web application exhibits as it presents content and performs functions.

Web application analysis model is comprised of a set of UML diagrams and text that describe content, interaction, function and configuration. Analysis of web applications is done when the following conditions are met:
- Web application to be built is large and complex.
- Number of stakeholders is large.
- Number of web engineers and other contributors is large.
- Web application's goals and objectives will effect the business bottom line.
- Success of web application will have strong bearing on the success of business.

Requirement analysis consists of formulation, requirement gathering and analysis modeling. In formulation, goals, objectives and categories of users are defined. In requirement gathering, communication between web engineering team and web application stakeholders intensifies.
Building a user hierarchy provides with a snapshot of the user population and a cross-check to ensure that the needs of every user have been addressed.

A use case diagram is created for each user category. Use cases are organized into functional packages and each package is assessed to ensure that it is comprehensible, cohesive, loosely coupled and hierarchically shallow.

Requirement analysis and modelling are iterative activities, new use cases are defined and added to packages, existing use cases will be refined and that specific use cases might be reallocated to different packages.