Reusability and maintainability in hypermedia applications for education

This paper reports the results of applying metrics to hypermedia authoring under the SHAPE (Southampton hypermedia authoring paradigm for education) r esearch project. The aim of SHAPE is to help authors develop high quality l arge hypermedia applications for education. The quality characteristics con sidered are the reusability of information, the maintainability of applicat ions and the authoring effort. In the hypertext field there have been a number of proposals for hypertext metrics, developed mainly in an ad-hoc fashion, contributing to the express ion of measures in an ambiguous manner and limiting their use. Unfortunatel y, many measures proposed in the literature lack the necessary mathematical or empirical justification. The metrics proposed in this paper have been developed using the Goal-Quest ion-Metric approach, and adhere to the representational theory of measureme nt. We describe the development of the metrics and the results of a quantit ative empirical study which compares two different hypermedia authoring sys tems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.