Profiling Web Components Quality Using User-Centered Assessment

Despite a huge innovation in technologies and services, the adoption of software engineering practices in web development is slow. Recently, encapsulation and interoperability have been pushed forward by a new paradigm: web components. However, there are still no universally accepted or even systematically applied quality metrics for web development. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics featuring product (intrinsic and extrinsic) quality. Our approach is validated according to a user-centered framework where we ask users to rate the quality of several web components within different scenarios or mashups which is quantified separately using metrics. Our results show that the metrics and user quality evaluation are highly correlated, which is promising. Therefore, we can conclude that: 1) the metrics should be part of an evaluation framework to assess the quality of web components automatically on the scale of public repositories, 2) this process provides a systematic methodology to identify which metrics might be suitable for new categories of web components, and 3) the approach can be set up to identify a mathematical function to provide a single value for quality based on metrics.