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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to classify the most important metrics proposed for web information systems, with the aim of offering the user a global vision of the state of the research within this area. Design/methodology/approach -WQM distinguishes three dimensions related to web features, lifecycle processes and quality characteristics. A range of recently published (1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004) works that include web metrics definitions have been studied and classified within this model. Findings -In this work, a global vision of web metrics is provided. Concretely, it was found that about 44 percent of metrics are related to "presentation" and that most metrics (48 percent) are usability metrics. Regarding the life cycle, the majority of metrics are related to operation and maintenance processes. Nevertheless, focusing on metrics validation, it was found that there is not too much work done, with only 3 percent of metrics validated theoretically and 37 percent of metrics validated empirically. Practical implications -The classification presented tries to facilitate the use and application of web metrics for different kinds of stakeholders (developers, maintainers, etc.) as well as to clarify where web metric definition efforts are centred, and thus where it is necessary to focus future works. Originality/value -This work tries to cover a deficiency in the web metrics field, where many proposals have been stated but without any kind of rigour and order. Consequently, the application of the proposed metrics is difficult and risky, and it is dangerous to base decisions on their values.

The demand for increased software quality has resulted in quality being more of differentiator between products than it ever has been before. For this reason, software developers need objective and valid measures for use in the evaluation and improvement of product quality from the initial stages of development. Class diagrams are a key artifact in the development of object-oriented (OO) software because they lay the foundation for all later design and implementation work. It follows that emphasizing class diagram quality may significantly contribute to higher quality OO software systems. The primary aim of this work, therefore, is to present a survey, as complete as possible, of the existing relevant works regarding class diagram metrics. Thus, from works previously published, researchers and practitioners alike may gain broad and ready access to insights for measuring these quality characteristics. Another aim of this work is to help reveal areas of research either lacking completion or yet to undertaken. A SURVEY OF METRICS FOR UML CLASS DIAGRAMS 60 J OURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY V OL. 4, NO. 9 Recently, paradigms such as Model-Driven Development [Atkin03] and the Model-Driven Architecture [OMG02] have emphasized the importance of "good" models from the beginning of the life cycle. For that reason, the main focus must be on the quality of models obtained in these "early" stages. In the OO paradigm one of the key artifacts is the class diagram. The class diagram constitutes the backbone of the OO development and provides a solid foundation for the design and the implementation of software. Therefore, class diagram quality has great influence over the system that is ultimately implemented. Quality in software products is characterised by the presence of different external attributes 1 such as functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability and portability [ISO01]. But these attributes can only be measured late in the OO software development life cycle. Therefore, it is necessary to find early indicators of such qualities based, for example, on the structural properties of class diagrams [Briand00a]. This is the context where software measurement is fundamental, because measures can allow us to evaluate class diagram quality characteristics in an objective way, thus avoiding a bias in the evaluation process. Measuring class diagram quality allows OO software designers: • to identify weak design spots when it costs less to improve them, rather than repair consequent errors at later implementation phases. • to choose between design alternatives in an objective way. • to predict external quality characteristics such as, maintainability, reusability, etc., and improve resource allocation based on these predictions. Although in the OO software measurement arena the need for measures that can be applied in the early phases of the development process is emerging, up until a few years ago the work done in this sense was scarce because most software measurement researchers focused on the measurement of c...

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Data Quality is a critical issue in today's interconnected society. Advances in technology are making the use of the Internet an ever-growing phenomenon and we are witnessing the creation of a great variety of applications such as Web Portals. These applications are important data sources and/or means of accessing information which many people use to make decisions or to carry out tasks. Quality is a very important factor in any software product and also in data. As quality is a wide concept, quality models are usually used to assess the quality of a software product. From the software point of view there is a widely accepted standard proposed by ISO/IEC (the ISO/IEC 9126) which proposes a quality model for software products. However, until now a similar proposal for data quality has not existed. Although we have found some proposals of data quality models, some of them working as ''de facto'' standards, none of them focus specifically on web portal data quality and the user's perspective. In this paper, we propose a set of 33 attributes which are relevant for portal data quality. These have been obtained from a revision of literature and a validation process carried out by means of a survey. Although these attributes do not conform to a usable model, we think that it might be considered as a good starting point for constructing one.

Background: Supporting sustainability in software engineering is becoming an active area of research. We want to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review(SLR) in this field to aid researchers who are motivated to contribute to that topic by providing a body of knowledge as starting point, because we know from own experience, this search can be tedious and time consuming. Aim: We aim to provide an overview of different aspects of sustainability in software engineering research with regard to research activity, investigated topics, identified limitations, proposed approaches, used methods, available studies, and considered domains. Method: The applied method is a SLR in five reliable and commonly-used databases according to the (quasi-standard) protocol by Kitchenham et al. [1]. We assessed the 100 first results of each database ordered by relevance with respect to the search query. Results: Of 500 classified publications, we regard 96 as relevant for our research questions. We sketch a taxonomy of their topics and domains, and provide lists of used methods and proposed approaches. Most of the excluded publications were ruled out because of an unfitting usage of terms within the search query. Conclusions: Currently, there is little research coverage on the different aspects of sustainability in software engineering while other disciplines are already more active. Future work includes extending the study by reviewing a higher number of publications, including dedicated journal and workshop searches, and snowballing.

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