A study of student strategies for the corrective maintenance of concurrent software
Abstract
Graduates of computer science degree programs are increasingly being asked to maintain large, multi-threaded software systems; however, the maintenance of such systems is typically not well-covered by software engineering texts or curricula. We conducted a think-aloud study with 15 students in a graduate-level computer science class to discover the strategies that students apply, and to what effect, in performing corrective maintenance on concurrent software. We collected think-aloud and action protocols, and annotated the protocols for a number of behavioral attributes and maintenance strategies. We divided the protocols into groups based on the success of the participant in both diagnosing and correcting the failure. We evaluated these groups for statistically significant differences in these attributes and strategies.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Fleming-al:ICSE08,
author = {Scott D. Fleming and
Eileen T. Kraemer and
R. E. Kurt Stirewalt and
Shaohua Xie and
Laura K. Dillon},
title = {A study of student strategies for the corrective maintenance of concurrent software},
booktitle = {ICSE},
pages = {759--768},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2008},
}