brooksmoses | (Reply)

From:

Out of curiosity how good a measure is LOC an indicator of closeness to the point where the only changes are due to qa/debugging etc?

That's an interesting question -- unfortunately, on my most recent project (which was rare in actually starting from empty files) I don't think we were doing version-control commits at a rate that would really give good data for that. Anecdotally, though, there's quite a bit at the beginning where people are doing design and writing small "sketch" sort of programs, with a fairly good bit of progress for few LOC. The overall curve is sort of an S-shape, flat at the ends and sloping more steeply in the middle, and I don't really have much idea how linear the range in the middle would be.

I also would expect it to vary a lot from project to project -- for example, this recent one has some "extra" bits that we can separate off and some people will be programming those towards the end while other people are debugging the core pieces, so that part of the curve won't be as flat as it would for a project that couldn't be separated like that.

The interesting trick for things like the Linux kernel and so forth is finding independent numbers for the effort involved. The only ones I've seen have been estimates based on LOC.