Section: New Results

Web Configurators

Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies' information systems and must meet stringent reliability, usability and evolvability requirements. However, the state of the art lacks guidelines and tools for efficiently engineering web sales configurators. To tackle this problem, empirical data on current practice is required. The paper [51] reports on a systematic study of 111 web sales configurators along three essential dimensions: rendering of configuration options, constraint handling, and configuration process support. Based on this, we highlight good and bad practices in engineering web sales configurator. The reported quantitative and qualitative results open avenues for the elaboration of methodologies to (re-)engineer web sales configurators. In [48] we focus on how to associate product configurations to visual representations in a Web configurator. We present a formal statement of the problem and a model-driven perspective.