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From: "Jerry Feldman" <Gerry.Feldman at compaq.com> Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 09:57:01 -0500 While certainly not open source, when at Raytheon this past year, I had to estimate the number of lines in the HP-UX driver I was writing because all the code metrics on the project were based on number of lines of code (this was mandated not by Raytheon, but by the prime contractor, and probably by the Army in this case). I once had a manager who used lines of code as a marketing tool, believe it or not. He asked me to count the lines of code in different versions of our product (a math library), and then he put those numbers on a slide to show the sales force how much functionality the product had gained! I don't know if customers ever saw this. The other engineer (as opposed to a bunch of scientists with no software engineering background) and I tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Evidently it was more compelling to do this than to plot, say, the number of user entrypoints (even that would have made more sense). I guess that by showing our library had 500K lines of code he could demonstrate how big and important his project was. Lines of code are a useful zeroth-order approach to estimating complexity and how much effort will be required to support something. Even accounting for differences in style, a 50KLOC program almost always will be faster to develop and easier to maintain than a 500KLOC program in the same language and in the same field of endeavor. It's completely worthless for anything else. Using it as any part of a compensation package severely distorts the incentives away from producing any kind of quality product. - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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