Dynamic Software Updating Techniques in Practice and Educator's Guides: A Review

Patching a program during its execution without restarting is called dynamic software updating (DSU). DSU is well acknowledged in research, but rarely applied in practice as witnessed by constant need for reboots and restarts of both applications as well as operating systems. This raises the question of how well DSU related techniques are supported in education. In this paper, we review how the major software engineering and education guides acknowledge dynamic software updating techniques. Our analysis indicates that although DSU is not explicitly mentioned in the guides, the need is already well motivated and many DSU concepts are implicitly supported. Based on this, we argue that DSU could be introduced as an optional topic in software engineering studies.