Software comprehension/maintenance: an introductory course

Software maintenance is a costly problem for industry, typically taking up to 50-75% of the cost of software development (IS). 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 the answer to the problem. Students often do not know how to comprehend already written code and do not know how to work in groups. This paper proposes a course that has been designed to better prepare students for work in the area of software maintenance by teaching them software comprehension methods. The course includes best practices, a large-scale project, and focuses primarily on code comprehension methods.