Thesis project at Scania is an excellent way of making contacts for your future working life. Many of our current employees started their career with a thesis project.

Background:
The main contributor to product lifetime cost is comprised of maintenance effort. Be it from software aging, bugs, or need of new functionality as user preference changes, systems need to be changed continuously over time. The harder to change and maintain, the higher the cost in economic terms and developer frustration. Many metrics have been proposed to help estimate the amount of effort needed to maintain a system based on the current implementation. The sooner corrective action can be taken to mitigate future maintenance effort the better. For this reason code metrics can be employed to estimate effort and propose parts of systems as candidates for improvement.

Target:
This project aims to explore the use of code metrics such as McCabe, McClure, Nested Block Depth, Proxy Indentation, and FanOut to support the development organization in estimating maintenance effort of systems in the future, in order to propose mitigating actions here and now to improve the implementation. The value of this is two-fold. Firstly, the organization can use future maintenance cost to calculate economic value of refactoring work during development. Secondly, the efforts of changing a system is not limited to after-delivery maintenance, it is also applicable during development. Analysis of systems under development can help illuminate the reasons for reduced development speed over the life-time of a project, and predict likelihood of on-time delivery.

 Example of assignments:

- State-of-the-art investigation, in industry and literature
- Investigate applicability of different code metrics on case-study systems
- Use code metrics to estimate effort of maintaining case-study systems in the future
- Build a desktop tool to support developers and managers in using code metrics on their system
- Use code metrics to predict on-time delivery of a system under development
- Propose prioritization for which parts of a system should be targeted for refactoring based on code metrics

Education: 
Type of project: MSc
Education: Computer science, electrical engineering, engineering physics, or similar.

Contact persons:
Bengt Haraldsson, industrial Ph.D. student, Scania,  bengt.haraldsson@scania.com 
Mattias Nyberg, Adj. prof. KTH/Research Manager, Scania, mattias.nyberg@scania.com

Number of students: 1-3
Time:20 weeks, full time 40 hours per week
Start: Jan 2025
Credits: 30hp
 
Application:
Enclose CV, personal letter and transcript of grades.
Application shall be registered in both: Thesis project application, and the "Apply"-button on this page
 
A background check might be conducted for this position. We are conducting interviews continuously and may close the recruitment earlier than the date specified.