Software Maintenance and Evolution

Software maintenance is a substantial part in the life-cycle of a software system. Typical studies show that more than 2/3 of the efforts are invested into modifications after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance, or to adapt to various other requirements such as platform or business changes. It seems obvious, therefore, that we need effective techniques and tools to support these activities to save costs and personnel resources in development and testing.

In this course, students will learn the foundations of software evolution and maintenance. This includes successful but aged software systems (i.e. legacy software), object-oriented reengineering, refactoring, change patterns, empirical analysis of software, classification/prediction models, software quality analysis. We will also discuss analysis platforms and tools, test case generation and continuous delivery technologies in the context of autonomous systems development (e.g., drones and self-driving cars). 

Learn theories, models, tools, and processes for the maintenance and evolution of large software systems and cloud applications.

Course mode in summary (considering the Corona teaching restrictions). The lecture is done regularly in mixed mode: the subset of students that are interested to participate in the lecture room, while the other can join digitally over Microsoft Teams. In case of a problem (Covid-19 cases grow in the fall semester), the online mode will be likely applied (all students joining via MS-teams). The slides and material of each lecture are shared upfront in both OLAT and the webpage of the course. Questions can be made during the lectures. Projects and exercises related meetings are in general done on a weekly basis via MS-Teams. The time slots for them are discussed between the lecturer and the students. On request, other channels (e.g., Slack) can be created for running the projects, but the default way is to use sub-channels of the MS-teams dedicated to the course. We encourage students to contact the lecturer via MS-teams and/or email for any doubt about the projects, exercises, and the exam.

This course offers a combination of lectures and exercises. The exercises are required for the course as they will provide a better understanding of how the theory (published in research works) can be applied in practice. This way the students actively learn during the lecture and through preparation before and after the lecture based on concrete examples. There will be exercises for the students to do individually and a project that will be done in groups of 3-4 students. 

Sometimes, successful projects lead to the publication of relevant conferences or journals.

Consider for example the

1) Ticket Tagger project  (the source repository available at

https://github.com/rafaelkallis/ticket-tagger) accepted to the ICSME conference to one of our previous students (Rafael Kallis) in 2019: 

https://icsme2019.github.io/accepted_papers.html

2) And the project on " the use of Web Assembly in a Serverless Context". It was accepted recently as a research paper at ESSCA: 

S. Murphy, L. Persaud, W. Martini, and B. Bosshard "On the use of Web Assembly in a Serverless Context," Second European Symposium on Serverless Computing and Applications (ESSCA), organized with XP2020, June  2020.

The topics of the written exam are (i) the required reading list and (ii) the content of the slides of each lecture, and (iii) questions related to the exercises and group project.

The additional/optional reading list is not required for the written examination.

Important, the written exam needs to be passed with a minimum of >=3.75 (otherwise it will be considered as a fail). This means that the points for the exercises and the group works are added only if the exam is passed with a reasonable grade. This to avoid cases in which good results are reached in the project and exercises, but too low grades in the written exam are achieved (concerning the theory behind the practical exercises).

• Motivation, challenges and definitions in the field of software evolution
• Variants of software maintenance, relations to software engineering life-cycle
• Techniques of software evolution and testing
• Quantitative analyses, empirical analyses, qualitative analyses of software
• Evolution dynamics
• Case studies and assignments

Support for this course is provided by:

All complementary material will be made available in the OLAT-Resource for Software Maintenance and Evolution. All course materials, for example, slides, exercises, tools, etc., can be found there. It also contains a forum, where we will post announcements and answer questions related to the lecture in a timely fashion. Since, for technical reasons sometimes it is not possibile to update/upload data in the OLAT platform we provide all the essential materials (slides, exercises, tools) in this web page of the course.

The list of weekly topics may be subject to change. The slides will be updated on a week by week basis. NOTE: Please check back to this table, as lecture units may change on short notice!

Exam

At the end of the course there will be a written exam (in the usual lecture slot). In case of only few participants, there will be an oral exam (with individual exam dates).