Path: utzoo!attcan!sobmips!uunet!mcsun!ukc!reading!minster!paulb
From: paulb@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Maintenance
Message-ID: <627127246.11859@minster.york.ac.uk>
Date: 15 Nov 89 10:00:47 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 18

In article <78584@linus.UUCP> you write:
>In article <11064@cbnews.ATT.COM> kww@cbnews.ATT.COM
>(Kevin W. Wall,55212,cb,1B329,6148604775) writes:       `Just once I'd
>`like to see a homework assignment in some CS course be something like
>`
>`	"add features X and Y to this 60,000 software system (which the
>`	students have never seen before) and turn it in next week".
>
>Would someone (or more) please address why this is not done.

I can't speak for American universities (or even British universities in
general), but at Durham, we are given problems of the type above.  In my
year there was a software maintenance workshop in which students had to
both debug and add functionality to a full size compiler.  If it's not
done elsewhere, it should be.

Paul Butcher
JANET:paulb@uk.ac.york.minster