Line of Code Software Metrics Applied to Novice Software Engineers

Sammanfattning: In the world of modern software engineering, there are certain metrics used to measure size and effort of projects. This provides insight to how engineers work, however when it comes to novice engineers there is little to no documentation. Without enough documentation this becomes a problem when trying to make predictions on projects involving novice software engineers, since there simply is not enough previous work on the area involving novice software engineers.The problem is that there is very little research available when it comes to how novice software engineers efficiency compares to more experienced software engineers. This makes it difficult to calculate predictions on software projects where novice engineers are involved. So how do novice engineers distribute their time and effort in a software development project?The purpose is to find out how the time is distributed in a workplace involving novice software engineers. Further is to learn more of the differences between how novice and experienced software engineers distribute their time and effort in a project.The goal of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how novice software engineers contribute to a software project.In this work, a case study has been done with two novice engineers at a workplace in order to learn more about how novice engineers contribute to a software project. In this case study, a quantitative research method was adapted using the Line of Code software metric to document how the novice engineers distributed their time.The results of the case study showed that the two novice engineers spent far more time coding than planning and that they wrote code faster than the average experienced engineer.