DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-7466-7_se-07
Authors: Thiam Kian Chiew and Karen Renaud
Abstract:
The ease of creating Web pages with the aid of various authoring tools and the pressure to design, develop and deploy Web pages within a short period have resulted in Web pages that are not only improperly designed, but are also characterized by a lack of adequate documentation, if documentation exists at all. Reverse engineering is therefore a feasible approach to supporting maintenance of Web sites. In this paper, we present a reverse engineering approach for Web page maintenance which utilizes a number of systematic steps in order to evaluate individual Web pages, particularly in terms of characteristics that affect Web page response time. Webpages are evaluated from the perspective of their creation and content complexity. Each type of complexity is represented by three complexity dimensions. This Webpage complexity model was empirically tested to verify correctness, and the results were encouraging, demonstrating the potential of this approach. We applied the approach on a prototype Web site and were able to identify and rectify problematic Web pages in terms of slow response time.
Keywords: complexity; creation; content; maintenance; Web page
Updating...