Using Software Engineering Principles to Develop a Web-Based Application

In the United States, the software development industry is about a $220 billon industry. Therefore, the need to produce accessible, reliable and trustworthy software that is within budget and that also meets the demands of the heterogeneous user can sometimes become an overwhelming task by organizations. Since its inception in the late 1960s, software engineering has used software processes as systematic approaches that lead to the development of software applications. However, with the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there have been changes to the way that software is produced. The aim of this paper is to present the results of an inquiry that introduced to undergraduate software engineering students an approach to developing a web-based application. Traditionally, specialized web engineering courses are offered at the graduate level or as an elective course in an undergraduate curriculum. The paper presents a semester-long project that combines some traditional software engineering processes with web engineering processes. The results from the study suggest that introducing a hybrid approach inclusive of traditional software processes and web engineering techniques can be done successfully at the undergraduate level but not without certain challenges.