Post-deployment specification, analysis and testing of enterprise web applications

The pressing market and corporate demands are leading to very short software development cycles for web applications, This leads to product deployment with minimal or no documentation and unstructured specifications which could eventually result in failure of the product despite its initial attractiveness. We have developed and successfully tested a practical methodology that addresses these issues during the deployment phases. For a fraction of the cost of original development, maintenance and support documentation can be generated, staff trained, and a disaster recovery plan put in place. In addition, a security audit and stress testing can be conducted to identify weaknesses of the application and to suggest short-term and long-term enhancements to the product. These recommendations not only allow for well planned and tiered upgrades, but also provide for systematic addition of software modules for product enhancement. The proposed methodology is applicable to any web-deployed application that uses dynamic content generation with a transaction-based backend.