Measuring the readability and maintainability of hyperdocuments
A. Hatzimanikatis, Christos Tsalidis, Dimitris Christodoulakis · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1995
Abstract The problem of poorly written hyperdocuments has already been identified. Furthermore, there is no complete definition of hyperdocument quality and the methodology and tools that will help in analysing and assessing the quality of hyperdocuments are missing. The ability to measure attributes of hyperdocuments is indispensable for the fields of hyperdocument authoring and hypertext engineering. Useful paradigms can be drawn from the practices used in the software engineering and software measurement fields. In this paper we define a hyperdocument quality model, based on the ideas of the well‐known Factor‐Criteria‐Metric hierarchical model. The important factors of readability and maintainability are defined, as well as the corresponding criteria. Finally, structure metrics, that can be computed on the hypertext graph, are presented. Most of these metrics are derived from well‐known software metrics. Experimentation is a key issue for the application of measurement, and flexible tools for the automatic collection of measures are needed to support it. Athena, a tool that was originally developed for software measurement and later tailored to meet hypertext measurement needs, is used for hyperdocument measurement.