Developing Instructional Material for Teaching Software Comprehension/Maintenance

Abstract

Software maintenance is a costly problem for industry. Traditional Computer Science programs often do not prepare students to face this problem. Since a large part of software maintenance is software comprehension, better comprehension methods are part of the answer to the problem. Students often do not know how to comprehend already written code. Students should be taught a standardized way of software comprehension in preparation for the software maintenance jobs most will have. The comprehension/maintenance area of computer science education has not been extensively covered as a research topic. This work is a detailed proposal for a software maintenance course, using techniques utilized by other researchers to teach software maintenance and software comprehension techniques in a required course. The course includes best practices, a large-scale project, and focuses primarily on code comprehension methods in order to prepare students for a job in industry..