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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISThe discipline to build project-specific method based on a situation is called Situational MethodEngineering. It proposes strategies to select methods, called method fragments (from a repository), to create anew one based on characteristics of the development circumstances (Brinkkemper, 1996).Based on the above observations, there is an interest in the following research issues: Is it possible to set aweb application development methodology based on different situations, using the principles of SituationalMethod Engineering and the foundations of Web Engineering? Which indicators or attributes are adequateenough to characterize a web application development?The idea behind this proposal is that Web applications development needs flexible approaches that allowdevelopers to configure the process and to generate the product models, according to a set of attributes aboutthe project characteristics and situation. Also the flexible approach has to guide the developers in the creationof models and artifacts, needed to specify the Web application to be implemented.To achieve the flexible approach we are designing and developing WEBFDM (Bianchini et al., 2005), amethodology for the development of Web applications and a CASE tool, we call COHESION (Bianchini et al.,2007), which brings full support in the use of the methodology.This paper is organized as follows: related works are presented in section 3. The proposal is described insection 3. Finally, conclusions are presented in section 4.2. RELATED WORKSBased on the literature review, few proposals considered the possibilities of adaptation based on adevelopment situation. In (Engels et al., 2006) it is proposed a meta-process that uses and observes somecharacteristics about the project to be developed, and promotes the transition from an agile method to adisciplined one. In (Kraiem et al., 2010) it is proposed the construction of new methods based on existingfragment methods, based on Situational Method Engineering, and also provides three types of guidance fordevelopers: (i) the selection of the most appropriate design process-model; (ii) the selection of the mostappropriate method fragments, and (iii) the application of selected method fragments. In (Vlaanderen et al.,2008), the OOWS method metamodel is defined with the purpose of applying Situational MethodEngineering, in order to improve the development of CMS (Content Management System), because OOWSmethod “lacks expressiveness to define Web Applications in some domains as CMS” (Vlaanderen et al.,2008). In (Weerd et al., 2006), the authors state that web application development methods do not cover thespecific needs of a method for web content management implementations and present WEM (WebEngineering Method) as an assembly-based Situational Method Engineering approach applied to develop anew design method for the domain of CMS. In (Luinenburg et al., 2008) is proposed the Method AssociationApproach, which selects and constructs methods from five model-driven Web modeling approaches to fit theproject domain. A research about identifying indicators of characteristics of Web applications has beenproposed by (Selmi et al., 2005). In a study about practical application of Web Engineering, conducted by(Escalona et al., 2007), there is an interesting proposal to categorize the complexity of Web applicationsthrough requirements elicitation.3. PROPOSAL DESCRIPTIONAll mature methods in Web Engineering provide techniques and mechanisms to specify the product model,including content, presentation (interface and interaction) and hypertext, but leave apart some aspects aboutprocess and product development models for shaping the development process according to differentsituations. A methodology can be view as a collection of methods, or method fragments, used to address theproblem of Web application design and implementation, at different levels of abstraction.The existing methods in Web Engineering follow the well-known framework proposed by (Fraternali,1999) and (Retschitzegger and Schwinger, 2000) to modeling web applications at different abstraction levelsand also considers the customization in all dimensions. In the other hand, considering the principles ofSituational Method Engineering, we can view the framework as a collection of methods needed toaccomplish Web applications development. This interpretation is shown in Fig. 1.428