The Need for Empirical Web Engineering: An Introduction

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to motivate the need for empirical investigations in Web engineering, and additionally to describe the three main types of empirical investigations that can be used by Web companies to understand, control, and improve the products they develop and the processes they use. These three main types of empirical investigations are surveys, case studies, and formal experiments. Although all these three types are described in this chapter, we focused our attention on formal experiments as these are the most difficult type of investigation to plan and execute.