Abstract:

This paper addresses cultural concerns on global websites design and relates them to advanced requirements practices. Developers and users have different ideas of finding information on a web site. There are several factors that differentiate users’ understandings of information presented by web designers and this should be considered if a website is desired to be successful worldwide. We observe that cultural concerns may crosscut several base functionalities of a system, constraining and modifying them in different ways. The crosscutting nature of these concerns should be contemplated at early requirements stages of software development to have more adaptable and flexible systems. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering handles crosscutting concerns at requirements level and can be used to model cultural concerns in web applications. This paper examines Australian, Singaporean, German and Brazilian sites and relates them to requirements of users from different countries by identifying the cultural differences that should be taken into account.