In the context of quality assessment, this paper proposes two new kinds of data which can be extracted from source code. The first, definitely blocked statements, can never be executed because preceding code prevents the execution of the program. The other data, called possibly blocked statements, may be blocked by blocking code. This paper presents original flow equations to compute definitely and possibly blocked statements in source code. The experimental context is described and results are shown and discussed. Suggestions for further research are also presented.

It is widely accepted that there is more to software construction than basic programming skills [13,11,15,16]. Professional software construction involves not only understanding some theoretical concepts, but also mastering appropriate tools and practices. In this paper, we present an undergraduate course in Software Construction and Maintenance, developed with the goal of introducing students to those key concepts, tools and practices.We first outline the content of that course, explaining how it fits within our undergraduate program. We then present a key element of that course-namely, its maintenance corpus along with its testing frameworks-used to concretely introduce students to various tools and practices, e.g., automatic test execution, build and configuration management, source code documentation, use of assertions, etc.