Please cite this article as: C.J. Torrecilla-Salinas, J. Sedeño, M.J. Escalona, M. Mejías, Estimating, planning and managing Agile Web development projects under a value-based perspective, Information and Software Technology (2015), doi: http://dx.Abstract Context: The processes of estimating, planning and managing are crucial for software development projects, since the results must be related to several business strategies. The broad expansion of the Internet and the global and interconnected economy make Web development projects be often characterized by expressions like delivering as soon as possible, reducing time to market and adapting to undefined requirements. In this kind of environment, traditional methodologies based on predictive techniques sometimes do not offer very satisfactory results. The rise of Agile methodologies and practices has provided some useful tools that, combined with Web Engineering techniques, can help to establish a framework to estimate, manage and plan Web development projects.Objective: This paper presents a proposal for estimating, planning and managing Web projects, by combining some existing Agile techniques with Web Engineering principles, presenting them as an unified framework which uses the business value to guide the delivery of features. Method:The proposal is analyzed by means of a case study, including a real-life project, in order to obtain relevant conclusions. Results:The results achieved after using the framework in a development project are presented, including interesting results on project planning and estimation, as well as on team productivity throughout the project. Conclusion:It is concluded that the framework can be useful in order to better manage Web-based projects, through a continuous value-based estimation and management process.

Abstract. Functional requirements are often written using use cases formatted by textual templates. This textual approach has the advantage to be easy to adopt, but the requirements can then hardly be processed for further purposes like test generation. In this paper, we propose to generate automatically through a model transformation an activity diagram modeling the use case scenario. Such an activity diagram allows us to guess in a glimpse the global behavior of a use case, and can easily be processed. The transformation is defined using the QVT-Relational language, and is illustrated on a case study using a supporting tool.

Despite the fact that the test phase is described in the literature as one of the most relevant for quality assurance in software projects, this test phase is not usually developed, among others, with enough resources, time or suitable techniques.To offer solutions which supply the test phase, with appropriate tools for the automation of tests generation, or even, for their self-execution, could become a suitable way to improve this phase and reduce the cost constraints in real projects.This paper focuses on answering a concrete research question: is it possible to generate test cases from functional requirements described in an informal way? For this aim, it presents an overview of a set of relevant approaches that works in this field and offers a set of comparative analysis to determine which the state of the art is.

Today's world economic situation is ruled by issues such as reducing cost, improving quality, maximizing profit, and improving and optimizing processes at organizations. In this context, business process management can be an essential strategy, but it is not usually consolidated at software organizations because software process properties involve a complex business process management application on software lifecycle. Consequently, software organizations often focus on Software Process Modeling (SPM), and each involved role performs process execution and orchestration independently and manually. This fact makes software processes maintenance, monitoring, and measurement become difficult tasks. This paper proposes a model‐based approach for SPM taking into account concepts related to process execution, orchestration, and monitoring. It is framed into a model‐driven engineering‐based and tool‐based framework: Process Lifecycle Management for Business Software (PLM4BS). We present a SPM metamodel and its concrete syntax (through Unified Modeling Language profiles) that lays the foundation for extending PLM4BS. Its underlying metamodel allows managing processes automatically. Furthermore, PLM4BS improves current state‐of‐the‐art proposals in 6 dimensions: expressiveness, understandability, granularity, measurability, orchestrability, and business variables and rules. Also, PLM4BS has been evaluated in a multiple‐case study, in which the 6 mentioned dimensions were already validated.

Scrum has become one of the most popular agile methodologies, either alone or combined with other agile practices. Besides, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is accepted as a suitable model to measure the maturity of the organizations when developing or acquiring software. Although these two approaches are often considered antagonist, the use of an agile approach to reach certain CMMI maturity levels may result beneficial to organizations that develop Web systems, since they would take the advantages of both approaches. In Web community, this union may be very interesting, because agile approaches fits with the special needs of Web development, and they could be a useful tool for companies getting a certain grade of maturity. This work analyzes the goals of CMMI maturity level 2 and the feasibility of achieving them using the practices proposed by Scrum, trying to assess whether the use of this methodology is suitable for meeting the CMMI generic and specific goals or not. Finally, and based on this analysis, this paper raises a possible extension of Scrum, based on agile techniques, to accommodate the CMMI maturity level 2.