Developing E-commerce applications from task-based descriptions

Abstract

In the development of E-commerce applications several decisions must be taken to provide the information, functionality and navigation that better fills to the commercial needs of an organization. These decisions define the requirements that an E-commerce application must satisfy. Although there are a significant number of proposals for modelling and developing E-commerce applications, very few of them clearly state how to elicit and represent E-commerce requirements, and how to go from the requirements specification to the Web conceptual model with a sound methodological basis. This work presents an approach to capture E-commerce application requirements by means of: (1) the identification of the tasks that users must be able to achieve and (2) the description of these tasks from the point of view of the interaction that the user requires of the web application. In addition, we show how the web conceptual model of the OOWS method can be systematically derived from a task description. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.