A Novel Lifecycle Model for Web-based Application Development in Small and Medium Enterprises

Software engineering s lifecycle models have proven to be very important for traditional software development. However, can these models be applied to the development of Web-based applications as well? In recent years, Web-based applications have become more and more complicated and a lot of efforts have been placed on introducing new technologies such as J2EE, PhP, and .NET, etc., which have been universally accepted as the development technologies for Web-based applications. However, there is no universally accepted process model for the development of Web-based applications. Moreover, shaping the process model for small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which have limited resources, has been relatively neglected. Based on our previous work, this paper presents an expanded lifecycle process model for the development of Web-based applications in SMEs. It consists of three sets of processes, i.e., requirement processes, development processes, and evolution processes. Particularly, the post-delivery evolution processes are important to SMEs to develop and maintain quality web applications with limited resources and time.