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.