Class overview

The course covers the following topics:

Software Evolution

• definition of software evolution
• laws of software evolution
• impact of software evolution on the software lifecycle

Software Maintenance

• definition of software maintenance
• place of software maintenance in the software lifecycle
• types of software maintenance (perfective, corrective, adaptive, preventive)
• steps of software maintenance process
  • requirements analysis
  • change requests
  • impact analysis
  • (re)design, (re)factoring, (re)coding
  • release planning

Program Comprehension

• definition and importance of program comprehension
• types of program comprehension (top-down, bottom-up)
• manual program comprehension
• automated program comprehension
  • static analysis
  • dependency graphs (call, inheritance, type-usage, dataflow, control flow)
  • program slicing
• program comprehension tools

Software Quality

• definition of software quality
• importance of software quality in maintenance
• software quality taxonomies
• software quality predictors
• software quality metrics (code size, comment density, static/dynamic coupling, cohesion, complexity)
• quality models
• software quality tools

Software Maintenance in Practice

• a selection of real-world use-cases from the IT industry
• explanation of analyses and tools/techniques used to address each case