A teaching experience on software reengineering

Software maintenance is recognized as an important knowledge area within the most common international curricula in software engineering. Despite this fact, and its importance in the industry, software maintenance and supporting techniques such as reengineering are hardly ever taught in practical lessons. This paper presents a reengineering teaching experience conducted during two last years in lab sessions by using reverse engineering and code generation tools. The experience was carried out by merging traditional methods (such as teaching lessons) with a practical exercise in laboratory. The teaching-learning process was qualitative- and quantitatively assessed by comparing results between an initial and final evaluation, as well as between the experiences conducted during two last years with different syllabus of courses. In fact, the effect of the experience in both syllabi proved to be effective. The reported results show that students do not know reengineering as a software maintenance technique although their satisfaction with the experience was high or very high (62%) or medium (30%). The key learned lessons are that students recognized the usage of reengineering tools as very convenient for their performance as future practitioners and the need to devote additional time in classroom to learn such tools.