The World Wide Web has become a major delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their ubiquitous usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve. Web development can benefit from established practices from other related disciplines, but it has certain distinguishing characteristics, which are mainly due to its inherent multidisciplinary, encompassing contributions from diverse areas, such as systems analysis and design, software engineering, distributed systems, hypermedia/hypertext engineering, requirements engineering, human-computer interaction, user interface design, information engineering, information indexing and retrieval, testing and project management.

On the other hand, mobile devices and applications (apps) are an inherent part of our private and business life. We use apps to consume content, get entertained, perform personal information management like mail and calendar, or take notes. Organizations more and more use highly specialized apps developed for their business, for instance, pilots of airplanes, farmers, or various kinds of sales persons. All users of apps expect high quality apps, for instance, a high user experience. Further quality attributes of specific interest in the mobile domain are, for instance, security, energy efficiency, performance, portability, reusability, flexibility, or maintainability. Overall, the required quality profile can vary depending on the type of mobile app. But nevertheless, all mobile apps must be thoroughly engineered to be able to meet the quality requirements of their users and all other stakeholders involved in apps.

The engineering of Web and mobile applications requires methods tailored to these domains to guarantee the required quality. The aim of this thematic track was to solicit contributions on how to properly integrate quality evaluation techniques into Web and mobile engineering.

From the quality in Web engineering perspective, this includes contributions on how to leverage Web-based systems quality with Web Engineering techniques, as well as on how to integrate quality assurance in the Web Engineering lifecycle itself. From the quality in mobile engineering perspective, this includes methods to guarantee the quality of mobile apps by construction like tailored requirements engineering, UI & interaction design, or architectural design methods, as well as analytical quality assurance methods like testing and inspection methods tailored to the mobile domain.

During the track ten papers were presented. Five of them deal with various aspects of quality in Web applications, ranging from evaluating quality in use, measuring the end-users perceptions of data quality in Web portals, modeling and evaluating the usability of Web applications and testing Web applications.

In “Using Web Quality Models and Questionnaires for Web Applications Understanding and Evaluation” Lew et al. develop a questionnaire as a means to evaluate a strategy for improving the quality in use of Web applications. The questionnaire uses the ISO/IEC 25010 quality models with questions mapped specifically to evaluate the corresponding characteristic. The questionnaire has been instantiated for evaluating the communicability, sense of community, effectiveness, efficiency, learnability in use, comfort, pleasure and trust characteristics.

In “Women vs. Men: Perceptions of Data Quality in Web Portals”, Moraga et al. report the results of a study that inquires into users’ opinions about the intrinsic data quality in Web portals. The goal of the study was to analyze whether there are any differences in data quality preferences depending on the user’s gender.

In “Modelling Websites Navigation Elements According to Usability Aspects”, de Moraes Junior et al. state that providing models amendable to usability analysis becomes crucial to deal with the time-to-market and quality of new Web applications. The authors then propose a framework for analyzing the Web application elementary navigation elements according to well-known usability principles.

In “Modeling and Evaluating User Interface Aesthetics” Abbasi et al. exploit the ISO/IEC 25010 quality standard to specify user interface aesthetics requirements from two perspectives of quality (i.e., product quality and quality in use), providing a platform for evaluating and improving the user interface aesthetics. The approach has been applied to two local Chinese radio Web applications.

In “Testing the Adherence of Enterprise Web-Applications to Transactional Patterns”, Nunes et al. present an approach for using existing Web Services perturbation and mutation techniques to help identifying test cases for transactional patterns.

One paper presented in the track specifically dealt with how to address User Experience /Usability as an essential quality attribute for mobile business apps in the app construction process. In “Quality by Construction through mConcAppt – Towards Using UI-Construction as Driver for High Quality Mobile App Engineering” Hess et al. present the mConcAppt approach as a user-centric engineering approach for mobile business apps. From the point of view of a UI and interaction designer they describe the interfaces to other essential activities in the mobile app engineering process like, for instance, architectural design, implementation, or testing.

With the advent of Web 2.0, there is a need for new quality evaluation techniques that address the requirements posed by the modern Web applications, where the interaction of end-users with the Web as well as Web communities are becoming more and more important. Three papers in the track deal with the quality specification and evaluation of mashup applications and another paper deals with improving the quality of the community relations.

In “Quality-Aware Mashup Composition: Issues, Techniques and Tools”, Cappiello et al. discuss some quality dimensions that captures the intrinsic quality of mashup components as well as the components’ capacity to maximize the quality and the end-user perceived value of the overall composition. The authors also propose an assisted composition process in which quality becomes the driver for recommending mashups to the users.

In “Requirements-Driven Quality Modeling and Evaluation in Web Mashups”, Rümpel and Meißner investigate methods of specification and evaluation of quality requirements in Web mashups. In particular, they propose a concept for modeling mashup quality requirements and properties, considering requirements sources, targets and involved stakeholders.

In “Evaluating the Usability of Mashups Applications”, Insfran et al. propose a usability model aligned with the ISO/IEC 25010 standard that can be used to evaluate the usability of mashup applications and as a guide to detect usability problems throughout the mashup development process.

Finally, in “Improving the Quality of the Community Relations Knowledge Using Implicit Connections”, Ferreira et al. presents an approach for discovering implicit community-based relations by identifying connection degrees and shared patterns between individuals.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors for their contributions, the program committee for their reviews, and the QUATIC 2012 conference organizers for their support in organizing this track.