A study of student strategies for the corrective maintenance of concurrent software

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 wellcovered 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. In this paper, we report a number of interesting observations that came from this study. All participants performed diagnostic executions of the program to aid program...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Scott D. Fleming, Eileen Kraemer, R. E. Kurt Stirewalt, Shaohua Xie, Laura K. Dillon
• Keywords: ICSE 2008, Software Engineering