An approach for teaching software engineering through reverse engineering

As the number of existing software systems increases, it also does the number of software engineers involved in the maintenance of large existing systems. Maintenance projects are becoming more usual than new software developments. For this reason, Computer Science education should also consider the development of abilities to deal with large existing software systems. This paper describes an approach to teach software engineering by using existing real-life software systems, through reverse software engineering techniques. The approach introduces the student into a medium-sized team which has to perform a set of modifications over an unknown large software system. The learning process is directed towards the improvement of abstraction skills, a key skill for software engineers.