Selecting Open Source Software Projects to Teach Software Engineering

Aspiring software engineers must be able to comprehend and evolve legacy code, which is challenging because the code may be poorly documented, ill structured, and lacking in human support. These challenges of understanding and evolving existing code can be illustrated in academic settings by leveraging the rich and varied volume of Open Source Software (OSS) code. To teach SE with OSS, however, it is necessary to select uniform projects of appropriate size and complexity. This paper reports on our search for suitable OSS projects to teach an introductory SE course with a focus on maintenance and evolution. The search turned out to be quite labor intensive and cumbersome, contrary to our expectations that it would be quick and simple. The chosen projects successfully demonstrated the maintenance challenges, highlighting the promise of using OSS. The burden of selecting projects, however, may impede widespread integration of OSS into SE and other computing courses.