Foreword: Quality in Web and Mobile Engineering
Authors: S. Abrahão; R. Carbon
Year: 2012

delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their ubiquitous usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve. Web development can benefit from established practices from other related disciplines, but it has certain distinguishing characteristics, which are mainly due to its inherent multidisciplinary, encompassing contributions from diverse areas, such as systems analysis and design, software engineering, distributed systems, hypermedia/hypertext engineering, requirements engineering, human-computer interaction, user interface design, information engineering, information indexing and retrieval, testing and project management. On the other hand, mobile devices and applications (apps) are an inherent part of our private and business life. We use apps to consume content, get entertained, perform personal information management like mail and calendar, or take notes. Organizations more and more use highly specialized apps developed for their business, for instance, pilots of airplanes, farmers, or various kinds of sales persons. All users of apps expect high quality apps, for instance, a high user experience. Further quality attributes of specific interest in the mobile domain are, for instance, security, energy efficiency, performance, portability, reusability, flexibility, or maintainability. Overall, the required quality profile can vary depending on the type of mobile app. But nevertheless, all mobile apps must be thoroughly engineered to be able to meet the quality requirements of their users and all other stakeholders involved in apps. The engineering of Web and mobile applications requires methods tailored to these domains to guarantee the required quality. The aim of this thematic track was to solicit contributions on how to properly integrate quality evaluation techniques into Web and mobile engineering. From the quality in Web engineering perspective, this includes contributions on how to leverage Webbased systems quality with Web Engineering techniques, as well as on how to integrate quality assurance in the Web Engineering lifecycle itself. From the quality in mobile engineering perspective, this includes methods to guarantee the quality of mobile apps by construction like tailored requirements engineering, UI & interaction design, or architectural design methods, as well as analytical quality assurance methods like testing and inspection methods tailored to the mobile domain. During the track ten papers were presented. Five of them deal with various aspects of quality in Web applications, ranging from evaluating quality in use, measuring the end-users perceptions of data quality in Web portals, modeling and evaluating the usability of Web applications and testing Web applications. In “Using Web Quality Models and Questionnaires for Web Applications Understanding and Evaluation” Lew et al. develop a questionnaire as a means to evaluate a strategy for improving the quality in use of Web applications. The questionnaire uses the ISO/IEC 25010 quality models with questions mapped specifically to Foreword