Quality characteristics of the Internet applications

Prof. Dr. Ion IVAN
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
ivan@fx.ro

Mat. Priyatosh SAHA
PhD student, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
myemail313@yahoo.com

Abstract

The quality is very important in software development, especially for the Internet application, where are many users of them. In this paper are presented the main quality characteristics of the Internet applications. We describe the Internet application and the quality criteria, and we present different methods to measure the quality.

1. Internet applications typologies
	
The fast development of the connections based on a revolutionary infrastructure has modified the whole conception on informatics applications.
The Internet resources – as strictly dependant on communications based resources – are now opened towards various user classes. In other words, client typologies have their own Internet application typologies (IAT). 
	The first and most used IAT consists in sending and receiving written or voice messages, electronic mail being the most common of them.
The second IAT stands for creating the analysis specific virtual organisation, design and developing program modules. A large number of working ports containing licensed tools allow the elaboration of source codes for testing, update and mostly for assembling into finite product, ready to deliver in an executable form.
The third form of using Internet resources is the design of simple web sites with the purpose of presenting persons, organizations and domains. It is allowed only consulting and retrieving of some parts of text based on specific links. Control structures are being created to go back and forth and for horizontal crossings through the same level. 
The fourth IA is based on launching a programme in order to obtain results. There is no need to buy specialized software to solve a linear system of equations or a linear programming problem:  a site is accessed, constants are being inputted, restrictions are being defined and the application is launched according to a specific algorithm. The results are displayed then either the site is further explored or the working session is being closed.
The fifth IA type consists in obtaining a service through electronic payment. Acquiring goods, seats reservation, travelling costs are only some of the electronic commerce applications, to which are added e-business elements.
The sixth IA type is given by consulting based on knowledge from various domains, medical or financial domains making the top of a very long list. Acquiring results from an analysis or radiographic images or from a computerized tomograph stand for inputs of a self-trainable expert system. The result is either a diagnostic or a list with the most probable of them.
The seventh IA type is related to launching and controlling actions at distance, whether there are difficult environmental conditions or the impossibility of gathering a team within a designated space from space dispersed persons. In case of radioactive environment measurements, concerning interventions – including surgical ones – at distance, the Internet’s advantages are obvious.
The eighth type of IA concerns training, testing and evaluating, specific to the distance learning system. New concepts are being developed on virtual textbooks and testing systems organised after their gradual difficulty become stable.
The ninth group of IA corresponds to activating games involving one or more partners, either real-time or only interactive, without any previous conditioning.
The tenth group of IA targets videoconferences with various degree of message-exchange simultaneity between participants.
The eleventh type of IA concerns creating multimedia databases with a globalisation tendency with a wide area of utilisation, especially in finding elements according to composed criteria. Thus, identifying a missing person by fingerprints, event connecting and working with image transformation algorithms.
Also, musical data-bases and copyright management represent the twelfth and perhaps the most spectacular IA, based on clients’ number on one side and record labels interests on the other side, keeping in mind the quality of the digital technology products.

2. Target groups

An Internet application is designed to be utilised. The target group should be the subject of a thorough analysis, with the success depending on the knowledge of the features and especially of the restrictions imposed by the each customer.
Informatics applications which use Internet resources are targeting:
-	a group precisely delimited by age or profession;
-	a homogenous group of persons related to at least one known and quantified criterion;
-	a class of people belonging to a geographical area; the persons are highly different;
-	the whole population.
Public applications should be designed so that they meet the demands of the target group. The working group which develops such applications uses its techniques and tools so that the product would be accepted.
Considering the hypothesis that an application is accepted as good when at least 75 persons out of 100 are using it successfully, clearly when only 30% of the users of an application are successful we have a case of wrong design and the working team should be taken as unprofessional. The failure of an Internet application can never be blamed on the users. The designers team is working for the target groups, and not the other way around. This is the way we can explain the numerous failures of the public applications. A public application which requires two identification keys or does not validates or does not offer the correct data related to the original documentation of the user is a bad application, and its creators are just not competent. 
The ID code or the name of the person is essential in many applications. Manipulating all sorts of codes and labels are the result of a scary immobility. Also manipulating databases with suspicious integrity and asking the customer to validate them is an abjection. There are situations in which the designers of the public applications consider the public employee or its operator as the target group, even the real target group is the citizen. Such an IA imprisons the citizen due only to the incompetence of its designers and of the public operators whose duty is to bring up to date the data bases, all of them serving the final beneficiary, a person that defines the target group.
Any other approach is pointless and any IA that results from it is a total failure; a very expensive mistake, often paid from the public money.

3. Quality criteria

The quality of an Internet application is given by the sum of the technical, scientific and economic qualities it possesses in order to ensure successful utilization in at least 70% of the cases. 
All the quality criteria of the Internet applications have in view those aspects that satisfy the needs of the user. The quality requirements of the Internet applications viewed as software products and multimedia database are exclusively intended for clients. If the successful runs falls below 70% the application intended for the users of Internet resources does not exist because useless products are not achieved.
Naturalness is the quality that implies a logical approach, the utilization of established symbols, of accessible, logical and simple font and text which takes into consideration the age and qualification of all persons that form the target group. Naturalness must eliminate the implication of other persons as assistants in the exchange of messages between man and computer.
Accuracy refers to the content of the information supplied by the texts of the application. Accuracy covers the years, events, the correspondence between images and text, the consistency between the text and the actual development of events, the spelling of names. There are very efficient ways and methods to ensure the full correctness of the texts, if cooperation exists with the experts in the domain approached. Amateurs display an apparent encyclopedic knowledge but they use empirical sources, quotations and processed information rather than reference works.
Robustness is always related to the errors made by the user. An application lacks robustness when at the entry data or the use of combination of keys the incidental program behavior is identical with a stochastic automat the displayed messages and the resulting actions are unforeseeable or the man-computer dialogue breaks down.
Robustness is obtained if and only if the behavior of the persons included in the target group is analyzed to determine the errors in the man-computer dialogue. The designer of the application shifts the interest to those sensible zones of the messages and commands apt to increase the robustness. Data validation is essential in the growth of Internet application robustness.
Operability is the essential quality feature defining the agreement between messages and the initial, well-defined and accepted, goal of the application.
The success of an Internet application means that every person that visits the site where it is implemented finds the proper buttons for the complete solution of a transaction and the ways of introducing the elements that individualize the requirement.
Operability defined after the analysis of the target group ensures complete processing and finalization of results.

4. Quality measurement

Defining measurement is a problem of identifying the influence factors of quality and aggregation of the levels of variables associated with these factors.
The working hypotheses in the case of Internet A applications direct their qualities to the achievement level obtained by users through access to the incorporated procedures or texts.
The following are taken into consideration:
N – the number of the members in the collectivity or representative sample associated with the target group;
Ci – quality feature i;
K – the number of characteristics taken into account for defining the quality of the A Internet application;
ni – the number of persons who successfully used application A in relation to the quality feature Ci;
qi – quality index associated with the quality feature Ci, identified by the users;
Q – the average index of application A quality.
In order to establish the values of these indicators, the following relations are defined:

, 	
and

or

In the end, if the level of aggregate index Q>70% the A Internet application has a quality level that makes it acceptable to the target group, otherwise, the application is wrongly replaced because of the incompetence of the designers, software engineers and testers.

5. Conclusions

In the context of the information-based society the development of other domains of interest is necessary. Therefore, the analysis, design and achievement of information systems is replaced by the analysis, design and achievement of Web applications which are meant, by specific methods and ways to lay the bases for the development of better and better forms of Internet applications. The leap agrees with the new context that grows stronger with every passing day.

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