Hypertext: The Next Maintenance Mountain

Just as software has grown extremely complex and difficult to maintain, hypertext is now approaching similar complexity, with many documents based on large and intricate component graphs. For many organizations today, maintaining such documents is becoming a burdensome task in its own right.

The development process for hypertext documents is also starting to resemble that of software, requiring analysis of hypertext documents' ability to meet an organization's needs, well-planned design and implementation, and follow-up testing for consistency and effectiveness.

Also, hypertext documents are taking on a strategic role that may rival software for many businesses. Businesses use hypertext for intra-organization information management and exchange, market information gathering, customer interaction through advertising and browsing, and sales. As the scale and variety of business usage grows, the maintenance of hypertext pages may become as important to the economic success of an organization as software maintenance is today.

Since software maintenance is a major problem and since hypertext documents share many of the characteristics of software-structure, development process, and economic value-maintaining hypertext documents is also likely to become a major problem requiring immediate action.

Hypertext documents are quickly becoming large, complex, and unwieldy. Can lessons learned from software maintenance be applied to the problem?

References

"Hypertext: The Next Maintenance Mountain" by Pearl Brereton, David Budgen and Geoff Hamilton.

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