Customer pressure and competitiveness have driven the lead time for typical Web application development down to a matter of months. This has led to iterative and incremental approaches in the software engineering of such applications. While there are a number of hypertext design models currently in place, most do not address the prefatory requirements and analysis needed for a design that best serves the end users.

This short paper, with a large number of co-authors, surveys the current situation, and then proposes an agile approach to hypertext application development, which includes requirements and analysis. There is also a relatively extensive set of references. A case is made for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach, which enables large complex systems to be composed of independent software components with well-defined interfaces. Loose coupling in an SOA supports incremental development and deployment. Components of the proposed agile methodology include: personas and scenarios; multimedia resources and semantic associations (ontologies); storyboarding; unified modeling language (UML) use cases; and Web service design. The overall flow of information and feedback is given in a figure that helps pull the pieces together for the reader.

The paper is somewhat too short to demonstrate the potential richness of the proposed methodology, but it does serve to entice the reader into a deeper review of both the older and newer literature that relates to hypermedia and Web application development (particularly, to work with a focus on short lead times and a user-focused perspective). This paper should interest anyone attracted by its title.