Abstract. Development of Web applications is dynamic by its very nature. Web development processes have to facilitate a Web application's continual refinement and evolution based on feedback from end-users. Evolutionary development can easily be achieved by end-user involvement through seamless integration of feedback and issue reporting mechanisms into Web applications. This paper discusses the use of conventional methods and tools for maintenance and change management as an infrastructure for evolutionary development of Web applications. An example demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach. It describes our experience from integrating the open source issue tracking system Bugzilla into a Web application.

Testing is a major cost factor in software development. Test automation has been proposed as one solution to reduce these costs. Test automation tools promise to increase the number of tests they run and the frequency at which they run them. So why not automate every test? In this paper we discuss the question "When should a test be automated?" and the trade-off between automated and manual testing. We reveal problems in the overly simplistic cost models commonly used to make decisions about automating testing. We introduce an alternative model based on opportunity cost and present influencing factors on the decision of whether or not to invest in test automation. Our aim is to stimulate discussion about these factors as well as their influence on the benefits and costs of automated testing in order to support researchers and practitioners reflecting on proposed automation approaches.

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Software repositories and corporate databases capture different fragments of a project's history. Software cockpits integrate the data from these repositories and databases to provide a holistic view of the project and the capability to drill-down and analyze details. By incorporating existing data, the cockpit can be used effectively from the first day it is introduced. In this paper we describe our findings from integrating several repositories and databases for a large, distributed project. We highlight common issues in data integration, report on the resulting effort for the development of software cockpits, and share our lessons learned from this data integration project.

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