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those with large-scale goals, have invested in their
own laboratories, science personnel and / or
partnerships with academia (Karmarkar, 2011).
Then, Neuroscience is currently an interdisciplinary
science that collaborates with other fields like
economics, marketing or informatics. This science
could be useful to be applied to quality improvement
of Web applications and Web applications
development process. Regarding quality, we mean
that the Web application must fulfill all requirements
that customers really demand. In addition, it is very
important to control that the software development
process is the most adequate for software developers
to design the software product that we are looking
for our customers. Thus, neuroscience applies to
achieve quality improvement in Web applications
and Web applications development processes.
As regards quality, it is a relevant aspect to
consider in the software engineering context. There
are several different definitions in the literature like,
for example, conformance to user expectations,
which is often described as the “fitness for purpose”
of a piece of software. Another definition of quality
related to software quality measures concerns the
high quality of software design (quality of design)
and the high level software conforms to that design
(quality of conformance). In fact, regarding quality,
we basically focus on quality of the software product
or quality of the software development process. On
the one hand, quality of software product really
means that the software product meets all
requirements and needs that customers demand. On
the other hand, it is very important to control the
software development process to perform the
software product effectively and complete all
customers’ needs. Then, to implement customer’s
requirements is a key aspect for customers to accept
software products.
Normally, good references from satisfied
customers enable business growth in most
companies. A software development company that is
responsive to requesting and demonstrating a "can
do" attitude will gain competitive advantages. In
general, these benefits are obtained from medium to
long-term periods. Internal benefits, including cost
reductions from improved quality levels, are often
achieved much faster. Production costs can be
reduced when production processes are streamlined
or when their effectiveness increases. This can be
achieved through an improved process control that
reduces the undesirable production of unable parts.
Shortened machine setup times and immediate
availability of complete production information can
further improve productivity. Quality professionals
have studied valuable improvement techniques that
lead to reduce production costs through quality
improvements.
This paper comprises the following sections.
After this introduction, Section II analyzes some
related works and concepts found in the literature.
Then, Section III proposes the NDT methodology to
capture and define Web application requirements and
psychological/emotional experiences to be expected
by users. NDT is a Model-Driven Web development
approach for the development of Web applications
which is mainly focused on requirements. Section IV
proposes QuEF for the definition of a Quality Model
from the requirements and psychological/emotional
experiences defined by the NDT methodology. QuEF
provides templates and methods to define the Quality
Model and defines a life cycle for the Quality Model
that ensures the quality continual improvement of the
model. Then, Section V explains how this Quality
Model can be validated by neuroscience techniques.
Concluding the paper is Section VI by stating some
learned lessons and ongoing work.
2 RELATED WORKS AND
CONCEPTS
As far as quality in Web applications based on
neuroscience is concerned, lots of papers describe
the necessity of assuring quality and controlling the
development process of these Web applications or
software products.
Barsalou (Barsalou, 2012) explains that the
human conceptual system contains people's
knowledge of the world. The conceptual system
represents components of experience, such as
knowledge about settings, objects, people, actions,
events, mental states, properties and relations, rather
than containing holistic images of experience.
Componential knowledge in the conceptual system
supports a wide variety of simple cognitive
operations including categorization, inference,
representation of propositions and productive
creation of novel conceptualizations.
Wang and Patel (Wang and Patel, 2009) explore
the basic properties of software and look for the
cognitive computer foundations of software
engineering. They explain that the nature of software
is characterized by computer, behavioral,
mathematical and cognitive properties. The authors
identify a set of fundamental cognitive constraints of
software engineering, such as intangibility,
complexity, indeterminacy, diversity,
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