Teaching Software Engineering by Reverse Engineering

Teaching software engineering (SE) is a difficult but critical task, whether students are undergraduates, graduates, or professionals. Most designs of undergraduate courses are based on a large project. During this project, students apply methods that have been introduced during lectures. Project schedules usually follow life cycles corresponding to the steps that lead to the creation of new pieces of software. My intention is to analyze the difficulties that occur in SE undergraduate courses and to propose a method to improve course quality and to meet with industrial needs that are more reusability‐ and maintenance‐oriented. This article outlines a typical course and some of its weaknesses. Then, it proposes changes and discusses a different way of teaching SE based on the following ideas: Apply a reverse engineering life cycle that starts by making students deal with code, and, step by step, parts of design, specification, and requirement documents. This phase aims to motivate students, to make them cr...