The evolution of Websites

Abstract

One major attraction of the World-Wide Web is the ease with which a relatively untrained user can create or modify a Web hypertext document. However, this same flexibility often causes problems of low quality similar to those encountered in software developed by programmers before the advent of software engineering. Evolution of software has been the subject of much recent research. It is now well understood that a large proportion of software costs arise during the maintenance phase. This research aims to characterise the evolution of Web sites in terms of new metrics and models. The research draws on the work on: (1) software evolution, and (2) the analysis of hypertext and software by use of metrics and other means. The work is being evaluated by means of case studies.