A comparative evaluation of maintainability: a study of engineering department's Web site maintainability

Abstract

We have been maintaining the Engineering Department's Web site at Hofstra University for the past five years and our experience has been a mixed one: on the one hand it usually takes a few days to make even minor modifications to the Web site while on the other, the chain of checks and balances ensures that the updates work and the accuracy of the new information is high. We thought it is an interesting and useful exercise to analyze and qualitatively evaluate the Web site maintenance policy at Hofstra compared to other universities so that this information helps all concerned stakeholders to make modifications to the policy, if needed. We used the NFR framework for the analysis and evaluation, and compared the closely related NFRs (or non-functional requirements) of maintainability and cost (both, time and money costs), for the three different Web site maintenance policies used in the academia including that of Hofstra Engineering Department, and concluded that while there are tradeoffs involved, small changes in Hofstra's policies could significantly increase the maintainability of the Engineering Department Web site.