research-article

Software maintenance: what do we teach and what does the industry practice?

Authors:

Andréa Sabedra Bordin,

Fabiane Barreto Vavassori BenittiAuthors Info & Claims

SBES '18: Proceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

Pages 270 - 279

https://doi.org/10.1145/3266237.3266251

Published: 17 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Software engineering has been consolidated in the last decades with the increasing production of software products and with the consequent increase in the demand for maintenance of these products, making evident the relevance of the so called maintenance phase in the life cycle of a product. However, it is observed that both academy and industry do not prioritize research and practices in this area. Based on the assumption that academic education promotes the application of best practices in the software industry and that industry practices provide subsidies to delineate what should be taught and researched in the academy, one believes it is important to analyze how software maintenance has been addressed in these two contexts. The goal of this paper is to identify if what is being taught is in accordance with the international and national curricular guidelines as well as to relate the contents recommended and taught with software maintenance practices of the industry. In order to achieve this goal, a document review was carried out on the curricular guidelines and syllabus that address software maintenance in software engineering undergraduate programs and a survey was applied in the industry to identify the practices in this area. The document review resulted in 21 topics, among which basic concepts, maintenance process, reengineering and refactoring are the most referenced topics. The comparative analysis between the academy and professional perspective revealed that the topics related to the maintenance process and reengineering are little applied in industry. On the other hand, particular aspects related to the legacy systems and the impact analysis area are a reality in companies, however little explored in the academy.

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Cited By

Ferreira MBigonha MFerreira K(2021)On The Gap Between Software Maintenance Theory and Practitioners’ Approaches2021 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER&IP)10.1109/SER-IP52554.2021.00015(41-48)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/SER-IP52554.2021.00015
Hebig RHo-Quang TJolak RSchröder JLinero HÅgren MMaro S(2020)How do Students Experience and Judge Software Comprehension Techniques?Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3387904.3389283(425-435)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387904.3389283

Index Terms

Software maintenance: what do we teach and what does the industry practice?
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Software engineering education

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cover image ACM Other conferences

SBES '18: Proceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

September 2018

379 pages

ISBN:9781450365031

DOI:10.1145/3266237

Program Chairs:
Uirá Kulesza
UFRN
,
Rafael Prikladnicki
PUCRS
,
Marco Aurélio Gerosa
Northern Arizona University
,
Claudia Werner
COPPE/UFRJ
,
Rossana Andrade
UFC

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 September 2018

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SBES '18

SBES '18: XXXII BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

September 17 - 21, 2018

Sao Carlos, Brazil

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SBES '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 140 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Ferreira MBigonha MFerreira K(2021)On The Gap Between Software Maintenance Theory and Practitioners’ Approaches2021 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER&IP)10.1109/SER-IP52554.2021.00015(41-48)Online publication date: Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/SER-IP52554.2021.00015
Hebig RHo-Quang TJolak RSchröder JLinero HÅgren MMaro S(2020)How do Students Experience and Judge Software Comprehension Techniques?Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3387904.3389283(425-435)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387904.3389283

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