Automating Documentation Maintenance: Implementing Hyperlink Testing via GitHub Actions

This paper addresses the testing phase of the Software development life cycle, mainly focusing on identifying the broken links in documentation. Broken links cause serious issues that can bring down the integrity of the documentation, so it is required to regularly check for broken links in documentation. Current methods for detecting broken hyperlinks in documentation often rely on manual checks, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. This paper introduces a practical approach for automatically detecting broken hyperlinks in documentation files using GitHub Actions. The goal is to automate the identification of links with 404 error (i.e. Page not found) and invalid path reference issues, ensuring high-quality documentation in collaborative software projects. By incorporating this method into continuous integration and continuous Deployment workflows, it can automatically detect broken hyperlinks before integrating and publishing new documents, thus maintaining the documentation integrity.