Light-weight product-lines for evolution and maintenance of Web sites

Abstract

Software reengineering and maintenance are two classical activities in software engineering. Today, software maintenance is a time consuming task because requirements change and evolve frequently. Moreover, in certain domains, such as the Web domain is, these changes happen very often. In this way, new techniques to engineer Web sites are needed in order to reduce the time to market of Web products. In this work we describe the process of creation of a product-line using reengineering techniques, from already available products, applied to the Web domain. The aims of setting-up this product-line are to ease the maintenance of Web sites, and to accelerate the development of new ones. A product-line captures the common and variable aspects of software systems as key assets, under a common architecture in order to reduce the time to market of new software products; and software companies are increasingly adopting this approach. The reason for this is because Web maintenance operations must be often performed in a very short time, frequently motivated by changes in the customer requirements that usually expect to obtain results in a few days or weeks.