Objective and Subjective Metrics Meant for Evaluating Quality of Social Web Applications

Abstract

The lifetime of majority social Web applications is very short and it is common that developers change their purpose, abandon or terminate project when they realize that it has not met users' expectations. We strongly believe this is due to the lack of suitable methodologies, models, and measuring instruments meant for monitoring and examining quality of social Web applications during their life cycle. To address this issue, we initiated a research on development of a comprehensive methodology that would enable evaluation of both pragmatic and hedonic facets of quality with respect to social Web applications and facilitate their comparison at all levels in the quality model. The work this paper is dealing with presents one of the essential parts of the aforementioned methodology. After establishing the quality model in the form of the requirement tree, objective and subjective metrics in the form of performance variables were introduced. To wrap things up, we proposed elementary criteria defined as preference scales and on the example of two types of social Web applications we illustrated how elementary preference score related to estimated and perceived facets of quality can be determined.