Abstract:

Introduction:

Academia frequently collaborate with the productive sector to plan their study plans. The aim of this collaboration is to include up to date contents oriented to train and educate individuals according to the market and economics needs. However, there exists, in practice, a gap between what is taught in the universities and the knowledge required from recent graduates at organizations. This involve many university degrees, but it is more dramatic to technological and computing related fields. Hence, it is necessary to be in constant communication with the organizations of the productive sector to understand the knowledge needed by their collaborators, and to monitor the tools and best practices used by these, to adapt the curriculum of degrees and courses. Consequently, the aim of this research was to get insight of the tools used in the different stages of software development and maintenance to provide guidance on which could be covered by the curricula of computing degrees.

Methods:

A survey was prepared to collect information of tools used in the different stages of the software development and maintenance process, then it was distributed and answered by 274 respondents who mostly work in software development departments and software companies. Thereafter, the findings were analyzed, the tools used by organizations were mapped into the software life cycle phases and a discussion was carried out to associate systems in use to corresponding courses.

Results:

The type of tools used during software development and maintenance have not substantially change in time. However, the number of available tools, as well as their functionality and complexity, in terms of supported tasks and usability, have increased. Therefore, the market of these systems is diverse and have shown a dynamic behavior in the past few years. Hence, the mapping of tools carried out in this research was valuable to understand which ones could be considered when modifying the curriculum of computing degrees and which courses could incorporate their usage in homework and projects.

Conclusions:
The software development and maintenance processes involve the use of a large number of tools and the diversity of new systems requires tracking their use in organizations. The knowledge obtained by the survey allowed to determine the tools being utilized in practice, their relationship to the software development phases and how these could be associated to the content of courses, using as base the ACM curricula.

Keywords:

Tools, software processes, computing curriculum.