Due to the expansion of the Internet, web-based systems have rapidly proliferated. Firms, corporations, supermarket chains and governments provide their services through web-based systems, and there are companies that provide web-based services for other companies. Because of this development and expansion, many web-application development methodologies have been developed, and web-development versions of many renowned methodologies are now available.
In order to improve the performance of system engineering teams and increase product quality, it has become necessary to construct or adapt software development methodologies in order to fit the specific project at hand. This method of methodology engineering has been called Situational Method Engineering. There are various approaches to situational method engineering, yet the one prevalently used is assembly-based method engineering. The main purpose of the assembly-based approach is to select and assemble reusable method chunks from a repository of method components.
The main objective of this research is to build a generic framework for web development methodologies, based on which methodologies can be instantiated through situational method engineering. A survey on current web based application development methodologies is first conducted, and the relevant traits and evaluation criteria are identified. The generic framework is then developed and iteratively refined through evaluation by the criteria. The result is validated through practical application of the framework for instantiating and evaluating a concrete web-development methodology.