Editor's corner: Software maintenance: It's time to educate the educators
I want to talk about two things-software maintenance and software engineering education. Software maintenance is worth talking about. That’s that part of the software business where we spent 4080% of our dollars, depending on whose figures you’re looking at. Software engineering education is worth talking about. That’s that part of our educational process where we teach people about the pragmatics of building software. So the juxtaposition of these two subjects ought to be really exciting, right? In that juxtaposition we will educate people to deal with the biggest spender of the software dollar, right? Wrong! If you take a look around at the people who do software engineering education, you’ll find that, almost without exception, they don’t touch software maintenance even using a ten-foot pole. Why not? Why would the leading software engineering educators, working in places like Seattle University and Texas Christian and Wichita State and even Sterling in Scotland, why would they not teach software maintenance? Because, I found in asking around, these educators don’t believe there is any unique technology to maintenance. That is, once you’ve learned how to develop software, you will certainly know how to maintain it. The steps, after all, are the same-study the requirements, design the solution, code the design, and test the heck out of the result. So what else is there to say? At least, that’s the question the software educators are asking. Except they aren’t really asking. They think they already know the answer. So let’s poke at this question a little bit. Is there really a unique technology to software maintenance? My answer, and the answer in the thousands of locations across the world where people are actually