A software maintenance process architecture

Everyone is jumping on the "process improvement" bandwagon whether in an effort to increase quality or because it is dictated to them. Learning process improvement in an academic setting not only prepares students for the "real world", but allows them to experiment with a new software engineering concept in a benign environment. This paper describes the experiences of two students and one professor in Software Process education as part of the Software Engineering graduate program at the University of West Florida. A group of over 25 students at the Fort Walton Beach campus of the University jointly developed, used, and enhanced a process for software maintenance over a period of twelve months. The emphasis was not on writing software, but rather on analysis of the ongoing experience of maintaining existing code and on extracting the lessons to be learned from using a defined process. We believe this structured experience provided a much deeper understanding of the benefits and the practical problems of process improvement than could have been possible using lecture-based instruction or product-focused projects.