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Business processes refactoring to improve usability in E-commerce applications

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Abstract

Refactoring is a technique that applies step-by-step transformations intended to improve the quality of software while preserving its behavior. It represents an essential activity in today’s software lifecycle and a powerful tool against software decay. Software decay, however, is not only about code becoming legacy, but it is also about systems becoming less usable compared to competitor solutions adopting new designs and new technologies. If we narrow the focus on e-commerce systems, the role of usability becomes essential: higher usability is in fact a requirement to win the market competition and to retain customers from turning to other choices. One reason why an e-commerce application can start suffering from poor usability is because of its business processes (BPs) becoming difficult to access, complicated to execute, and, overall, offering a poor user experience. In this paper we argue that refactoring can be a key solution for this kind of usability issues. In particular, we propose a catalog of refactorings as a means to systematically identify and address lack of usability in the BPs of an e-commerce application, and to seize opportunities for usability improvement. To make the presentation concrete and to provide evidence of the benefits that applying our refactorings can bring, we present a number of examples with reference to well-known e-commerce websites.

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Notes

  1. Here and elsewhere not differently specified in the paper we use the terms “website” and “Web application” interchangeably.

  2. But not necessarily, or not only, to the Web interface of such user activity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unitelma Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Damiano Distante

  2. LIFIA, Fac. de Informática, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina

    Alejandra Garrido, Julia Camelier-Carvajal, Roxana Giandini & Gustavo Rossi

  3. CONICET, La Plata, Argentina

    Alejandra Garrido & Gustavo Rossi

Authors
  1. Damiano Distante
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  2. Alejandra Garrido
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  3. Julia Camelier-Carvajal
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  4. Roxana Giandini
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  5. Gustavo Rossi
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Correspondence to Damiano Distante.

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Distante, D., Garrido, A., Camelier-Carvajal, J. et al. Business processes refactoring to improve usability in E-commerce applications. Electron Commer Res 14, 497–529 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-014-9149-0

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