Experiences with a software maintenance project course

A report is made on an experience of teaching a senior-year course on software maintenance, centered around a maintenance project. For the course, students organized themselves into groups and worked on adaptive and perfective maintenance of selected real-world software products. The projects involved such issues as code understanding, requirements engineering, and maintenance design, and dealt with both open-source and proprietary software. The main triumphs and pitfalls of the course are recounted, and recommendations are made on project selection and general course conduct.