Seminars on Software Maintenance and Evolution: An Empirical Study of the Background Factors Affecting Student Success

Software maintenance and evolution (SME) is an important but challenging topic area for university-level computer science education. Seminars can be used to provide students with versatile and up-to-date knowledge on scien- tifically relevant issues. We organized three systematic university-level seminars on SME. In these seminars 127 groups have each been assigned the task of analyzing one scientific SME article. The main results concern background factors re- lating to the students, groups and articles as these affect student success in the seminars. This paper presents a strict statis- tical analysis and a discussion of these factors. Fourteen hypotheses were set and tested regarding the relation of various background factors and a student's success in the seminar. The results indicate a clear relation between some of the factors and success. Most of the student- and group-related factors clearly affected student success, whereas most of the article- related factors did not. The study also revealed many important ancillary results. The results support organizing, studying, and improving feasible seminars in this area.