RE: Source code statistics ...

Thank you all for your responses. Of course, these kinds of statistics are all but useless in any real management or statistical context. In our case, it is even more complicated because the surface area of our application set is HUGE and involves the creation and deletion of multiple source code branches during development, integration of runtime code developed overseas, all manner of machine generated code, etc., etc.

Fortunately, I believe the purpose for gathering this information is strictly PR related, internal or external--not in any sense a metric for measuring from a business or management perspective.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I work through them and determine which best suits our particular situation.

My appreciation goes to all who participate in this and the related mailing lists. Your feedback and help is always great.

Ken Parrish
Gomez, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dallman, John [mailto:john.dallman_at_siemens.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 1:26 PM
To: users_at_subversion.tigris.org
Subject: RE: Source code statistics ...

Andy Levy [mailto:andy.levy_at_gmail.com] writes:

> That's pretty much what I told the PM in my example. Several times
> over. I told him I judge progress on the number of features/requirements
> which have been completed successfully, not how many times I hit the
> Enter key. Even explained that sometimes I'll remove lines along the
> way because I found ways to re-use stuff I'd written before. Didn't
> matter. He liked raw LOC numbers. My guess is he was comparing notes
> with some of his friends about their programmers.

It can be worth pointing out analogies in fields that pointy-haired
managers might understand a little better. Measuring programmer
productivity by lines of code is like:

* Measuring the performance of a stockbroker by the number of trades
  he makes, rather than the amount of profit that comes out of them.

* Measuring the performance of a commedian by the number of jokes in
  his script, rather than by how many people come to his shows.

* Measuring the performance of a shole salesman by how many people he
  sees, rather than how many shoes he sells.

Hey, this is fun...

Lines of code are not *completely* useless as a measure: they can give
you a rough idea of how much disk space you need, how long builds will
take, and so on.

--
John Dallman
Parasolid Porting Engineer
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