Including practical software evolution in software engineering education

Software engineering typically requires more effort in maintenance than in development time. As such, software engineering education needs to actively include software evolution. Teaching software evolution to undergraduate students usually includes the theoretical aspects, but does not normally include the actual implementation. This paper describes the practice of teaching software evolution to undergraduate computing students at Monash University. It demonstrates how the four maintenance activities: corrective, adaptive, perfective and preventative, can be included into the practical component of a software engineering course, providing students with a much more realistic view of software engineering