Overview

Ask any student who has had some programming experience the following question: You are given a problem for which you have to build a software system that most students feel will be approximately 10,000 lines of (say C or Java) code. If you are working full time on it, how long will it take you to build this system?

The answer of students is generally 1 to 3 months. And, given the programming expertise of the students, there is a good chance that they will be able to build a system and demo it to the Professor within 2 months. With 2 months as the completion time, the productivity of the student will be 5,000 lines of code (LOC) per person-month.

Now let us take an alternative scenario we act as clients and pose the same problem to a company that is in the business of developing software for clients. Though there is no standard productivity figure and it varies a lot, it is fair to say a productivity figure of 1,000 LOC per person-month is quite respectable (though it can be as low as 100 LOC per person-month for embedded systems). With this productivity, a team of professionals in a software organization will take 10 person-months to build this software system.

Why this difference in productivity in the two scenarios? Why is it that the same students who can produce software at a productivity of a few thousand LOC per month while in college end up producing only about...