QSL: A specification language for e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems

Abstract

Many kinds of questionnaires, testing, and voting are performed in some completely electronic ways to do questions and answers on the Internet as Web applications, i.e. e-questionnaire systems, e-testing systems, and e-voting systems. Because there is no unified communication tool among the stakeholders of e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems, until now, all the e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems are designed, developed, used, and maintained in various ad hoc ways. As a result, the stakeholders are difficult to communicate to implement the systems, because there is neither an exhaustive requirement list to have a grasp of the overall e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems nor a standardized terminology for these systems to avoid ambiguity. A general-purpose specification language to provide a unified description way for specifying various e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems can solve the problems such that the stakeholders can refer to and use the complete requirements and standardized terminology for better communications, and can easily and unambiguously specify all the requirements of systems and services of e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting, even can implement the systems. In this paper, we propose the first specification language, named “QSL,” with a standardized, consistent, and exhaustive list of requirements for specifying various e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems such that the specifications can be used as the precondition of automatically generating e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems. The paper presents our design addressing that QSL can specify all the requirements of various e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems in a structured way, evaluates its effectiveness, performs real applications using QSL in case of e-questionnaire, e-testing, and e-voting systems, and shows various QSL applications for providing convenient QSL services to stakeholders.