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Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

blog.ndepend.com

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Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#101

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

m0zg wrote: post #83
cwingrav wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once opened up a government code base (in C) that lead with this: "void * * * * x;". It took a while to learn that code. Taking time is fine and good managers will support you, so long as you have something to explain what your time is spent on.

I'm consulting a client right now and their C++ codebase is full of gems of this caliber. I eviscerate every single PR, and tell them what's wrong and why, and then their CTO just merges them into master without changing anything. All the while they pay me for it. Why? Fuck me if I know. They hired me to provide advice. I provide advice, and it's pretty expensive. I _know for a fact_ they will regret merging this shi…

Fear of missing out...

'This code was already worked on and we paid for it... it can't surely be that bad'

If you deliver something broken it's better than delivering nothing... you'd be surprised how often we get 'We'll improve it later' compared to 'You didn't deliver anything?'

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#102

Post by jillesvangurp »

andrewstuart wrote: post #53
jillesvangurp wrote: post #47

That book was written in the seventies, 45 years ago. It still has valid points but obviously a few things have changed in terms of how we do things. For example, we use version control systems these days and have sophisticated refactoring tooling. But one of the things that hasn't changed is that we haven't really come up with any better metrics than time spent and nr. of things changed per time unit. There are a lo…

>> we haven't really come up with any better metrics than time spent and nr. of things changed per time unit Does anyone give a shit about metrics any more? I seem to recall the whole metrics thing fizzled out entirely about 15 years ago.

Individual engineers don't and never did; managers/planners do (at least the more competent ones) and always did. There's a difference between running a bunch of primadonnas and running an engineering organization that gets things done on a schedule & budget consistently. It generally doesn't involve just winging it with some full stack ninjas and hoping for the best and tends to involve lots of planning, KPIs, metrics, resource planning, etc.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#103

Post by dynamite-ready »

agumonkey wrote: post #88
dynamite-ready wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In 'Agile' development parlance, you would have an estimation session, where the group will look at the units of work to be assigned, and determine how easy or hard they might turn out to be. At their most objective best, everyone on a given development team can gain some insight into the work of others, and how hard it might be. These session can also be a great way to share knowledge, as developers with differ…

That's interesting, the few gigs I had were mostly "give us an estimate and see you never"

I can imagine.

It's surprising how few managers value objective estimation. But the problem I suppose, is what it does to the working relationship the rest of the company has with their software development team.

Basically, to allow a team of developers such an 'indulgence', every worker in a given business, including senior managers, have to accept that all interactions with the development team, are led by the development team.

That takes a lot of trust, and you'll rarely find that level of trust outside of a startup.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#104

Post by techbio »

nitwit005 wrote: post #54
seventh-chord wrote: post #2

Not quite sure what point the author is trying to make? He agrees that lines of code are a bad measure of productivity because, yet claims that the average he computes can help him predict future development times. Then he explicitly points out that different parts of the codebase required different amounts of work, apparently unrelated to their code line count, yet does not relate this to the previously mentioned po…

Even the assertion of that knowing the lines of code per day helps with estimation seems puzzling. How do you know how many lines the finished product will eventually have in advance?

How do you know how many pixels the ball will take up in a sports photograph before capturing it?

Enough to see it, not so many that you can’t see everything else.

Same with lines of code, except that instead of a photographer, there is an observing project manager.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#105

Post by esotericn »

antirez wrote: post #97

I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months: 70000/(22*11*10) = ~29 LOC / day Which is not too far from 10. There are days where I write 300-500 LOC, but I guess that a lot of work went into rewriting stuff and fixing bu…

From the sounds of it that also includes a decent amount of greenfield work.

I don't have hard figures to easily consult but I'd guess that I'm at about your average in total, but then on the days when I'm refactoring/debugging existing stuff, honestly it could be like 3 lines a day, or 5, or just planning/sketching something out.

It's like the old mechanic trope. It's not hard to replace a bolt, what's hard is knowing which bolt to replace and where.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#106

Post by Spooky23 »

bArray wrote: post #5

What annoys me most about these metrics is that some days zero lines are written. Anything up to a month without results to show. Where, then, does all this time go? Sometimes it's reading existing code. Sometimes it's learning about a new algorithm by reading blogs and papers. Sometimes it's developing test programs to iron out a bug or test out some new code. There used to be one chap in the office that got all the…

That’s fundamentally a lack of respect for the engineering aspect of software systems and a sort of self-loathing embraced by people in the field.

Many software roles require what I would call Home Depot skill levels. People at Home Depot take semi-finished materials in a kit and fix their toilet, without understanding how it works.

Likewise, some journeyman skilled developer and “code” a sign in page with an API without understanding the engineering process around OAuth.

The problem is many business people don’t understand anything beyond the Home Depot kit... they see stuff on the shelf and don’t understand that at some level that engineering side of the work needs to be done to create something novel. Reinforcing that notion are vendors hawking products.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#107

Post by fiblye »

antirez wrote: post #97

I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months: 70000/(22*11*10) = ~29 LOC / day Which is not too far from 10. There are days where I write 300-500 LOC, but I guess that a lot of work went into rewriting stuff and fixing bu…

Has progress on that been fairly continuous with the project growing steadily (almost) nonstop? Or was a big portion of that the groundwork just to get it to a point of being usable in the beginning?

With projects I work on, I'll often write a few thousands lines of foundation in a couple weeks, then I'm adding a line here and there as needed. The first 1000 lines are always easy. The next 10 can take days.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#109

Post by scarface74 »

gmueckl wrote: post #70
croon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk of the new one or the risk of keeping the old 100K lines? Half serious question since I would estimate the risk of the latter to be much larger.

To me it sounds like he was introducing a hard dependency on AspectJ, which is as much a risk as any other dependency. I am guessing here, bit it is a scenario where a hissy fit from management has at least some justification.

How is a dependency on AspectJ any more of a liability than the dozens of other external dependencies in your typical application?

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#110

Post by antirez »

fiblye wrote: post #107
antirez wrote: post #97

I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months: 70000/(22*11*10) = ~29 LOC / day Which is not too far from 10. There are days where I write 300-500 LOC, but I guess that a lot of work went into rewriting stuff and fixing bu…

Has progress on that been fairly continuous with the project growing steadily (almost) nonstop? Or was a big portion of that the groundwork just to get it to a point of being usable in the beginning? With projects I work on, I'll often write a few thousands lines of foundation in a couple weeks, then I'm adding a line here and there as needed. The first 1000 lines are always easy. The next 10 can take days.

I think this went quite constant. The main change is that in the first years I could work a ton of stuff 1 month, zero the next month, and now is instead more smoothed evenly.
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