Teaching Future Software Developers

Teaching software developer skills should be a fundamental part of software engineering curriculum. The current industry relies on evolutionary and agile processes that add one feature or property at a time. The main task of these processes is software change. Results of the recent research allow this topic to be taught on both undergraduate and graduate level. Phased model of software change (PMSC) divides the task of software change into phases that are sufficiently well-understood and suitable for teaching in the undergraduate course. Among the phases, concept location finds the module(s) to be changed, impact analysis assesses the full extent and difficulty of the change, prefactoring reorganizes software to make it suitable for the change, actualization implements the new feature, and postfactoring cleans up the aftermath.