Experiences from Software Maintenance Seminars: Organizing Three Seminars with 127 Groups

Software maintenance and evolution (SME) is an important but problematic topic-area for university-level computer science education. Seminars can be used to provide versatile and up-to-date knowledge for students regarding scientifically relevant issues. We have organized three systematic university-level seminars on SME with a total of 127 seminar groups. Each group has been assigned a task of analyzing one scientific SME-article. The main results include the general confirmed feasibility of the selected seminar-based approach. The paper describes the background of the seminars, their contents, and experiences concerning organization and feasibility of the seminars. The results support organizing, studying, and improving feasible seminars in software engineering.