Maintenance

Students are always taught that maintenance is the most costly phase in the SDLC. However, as mentioned previously, projects are often wasted after submission since their purpose is only to help students understand topical concepts. Hence, this practice does not correlate with the emphasis on maintenance and does not teach students the effective procedures to patch and improve their program after release.

With the OSSD education model, students can attract feedbacks and suggestions from peers and end-users for their projects, as they are submitted and maintained in the online repository. They can use these assessments to continue refining their applications. Students would be directly involved in software maintenance and would actively learn maintenance methods instead of just going over them in lectures, tutorials or exams.

A common issue with software projects is that certain members of the development team may lose interest at one stage, causing the work to be incomplete, or forcing it into early retirement. The open-source model allows and encourages students to mentor new initiates into the project in order to maintain and possibly expand the development, which are arguably the duties of a software developer. A direct benefit of this is that students would see themselves part of a larger trajectory of work [D.02]. They would gain mentoring skill and project management skill, which would be useful in the workplace where frequently new employees need to be guided into the company projects. Addtionally, this would encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration and enlarge the CSSE community.

The practical importance of good documentation and technical writing skill is highlighted here. To keep the project alive after losing interest in it, students would need to produce clear and detailed documentation to ensure that others can pick up and continue from where they left it. To effectively mentor newcomers, theys would need to explain the features and procedures of the project, which is best done by showing them how to ”Read The Friendly Manual”.

With proper maintenance of software programs, it will help to prolong the life of the software and accelerate the technology improvement by reducing the possibility of people reinventing the wheel, and emphasize on the reusability of the program.

Community and public

The OSSD educational model also brings tremendous benefits to the CSSE community and the general public. As professionals collaborate, exchange knowledge and experience, the community is strengthened. This would lead to closer relationship between students themselves and between students and experienced academics. Students would be more inclined to maintain such relationship and continue to contribute back to the community even after graduation, such as continuing with postgraduate studies and becoming researchers.

By producing better trained CSSE graduates, the proposed model would help to increase the quality of services for the general public. This would improve the reputation of CSSE professionals and raise public confidence of the profession. Additionally, with more skilled developers participating in open-source projects, the public would benefit from having more high quality software products for free.