Work in progress — Does maintenance first improve student's understanding and appreciation of clean code and documentation

The ACM's “Computer Science Curriculum 2008: An Interim Revision of CS 2001” suggests 31 core hours of Software Engineering covering the standard phases of software development. At many universities, including ours, Software Engineering is a capstone course with a semester-long team project. While the course covers the software development lifecycle there is not enough time in a single semester for students to gain an appreciation for all phases, especially the importance of testing and documentation to the maintenance phase which is the longest phase in successful software projects. To address this, a new course, Software Maintenance and Testing, was added as a pre-requisite to Software Engineering. The course will be implemented in fall, 2011. Students will be surveyed to determine if their appreciation for different development models, documentation, recording of design decisions, and clean code are improved by maintaining code prior to developing a brand-new or greenfield project. A Likert scale instrument will be develop to evaluate students' attitudes. The research instrument will be tuned until validity and reliability are achieved. Preliminary and baseline results will be presented.