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Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

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Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#181

Post by logicalmind »

scarface74 wrote: post #171
logicalmind wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# dev here as well, but from a Java background. When I first moved to C# from Java one of the best AOP usages was transaction management. Database transaction management. You could write all of the code, whether it was dependent upon the db or not, and then decorate the methods with a transaction attribute. This decoration contained all the logic to get a db connection, begin a transaction, become part of an existin…

TransactionScope has been around forever in the .Net Franework version of EF. It just came back to EF Core in 2.1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/codewala.net/2018/05/06/transac...

Yes, this is exactly the type of boilerplate I am talking about. All those usings and try/catch blocks which add needless code. It is possible to compose all of this into an aspect which then decorates your methods. Maybe I'm not being clear, so here is what I mean. Say you have a method that does some work, but calls some other thing to do some auditing. The auditing is nice, but it failing shouldn't halt the world.

  [Transaction]
  DoYourBusinessWork() { ...; AlsoAudit(); }

  [Transaction(RequiresNew, NoRollbackFor(AuditException)]
  AlsoAudit() { ... }
The TransactionScope is handled in the aspect. Commit/Rollback is all handled there is well. There are not usings or exception handlings within your methods unless you want to handle those specifically.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#182

Post by scarejunba »

heisenbit wrote: post #62
scarejunba wrote: post #13

Guys, can I be honest? I have never actually met anyone who has worked in a LOC-optimized company. This stuff seems like the outrage porn of software engineering.

You misunderstand the intention. You don't optimize LOC but you develop software as best as you can. You measure - among other things - LOC and this gives you at least some hard figures in the fuzzy software engineering universe. See it as the Hubble constant - it gives you answers about the universe provided you know it's value. Then when it comes to understanding your software costs - it helps you to put some numbe…

I'm talking about all of these comments on this page with people talking about how LOC/day is not a good metric for productivity. So? No one's tying your wages to LOC/day.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#183

Post by Cpoll »

cpascal wrote: post #163

My company has been experimenting with doing our feature estimations in LOC changed instead of points (1, 2, 3, 5). The general idea being that point estimation can vary between engineers based on ability, but LOC changed should be similar among engineers. This is supposed to make it easier to answer management's favorite question of "How long is this gonna take?". The answer is calculated using a team's historical a…

I wonder if LOC changed isn't often reversely proportional to time taken.

500 LOC feature: Add a new route that does something boring; 5 story points.

5 LOC feature: Fix mysterious performance degradation in X; 13 story points.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#184

Post by aidenn0 »

milesvp wrote: post #161
virgilp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better, don't measure LOC.

LOC is a terrible measure for productivity, but I like to think about it more as a measure of capacity. LOC/day is useful as an upper bound in the same way pages per day is an upper bound for authors. Stephen King is notorious for being one of the most prolific writers, and he can’t produce more than 8 publishable pages a day (top hit on google suggests his average may be close to 6). Knowing that the number of LOC/d…

Isaac Asimov, another prolific author, averaged something like 2800 words per day[1] over the most productive period of his career, which works out to about 9 pages, so that seems like a good estimate.

1: Google is giving a much higher number but they all seem to go back to the same estimate which is more hand-wavy than a printed source I found in college when researching it. Sorry I don't have it to source. The other number from that source was 1800 published words per day if you start from his first published book, which is absurd, since new authors tend to be much less prolific.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#185

Post by zackmorris »

We should probably be using the absolute value of lines of code, so abs(LOC) as the metric, or something like a least squares mean for estimating the moving average of LOC per day.

Anymore, my daily average LOC is probably negative since I tend to rescue floundering projects. I usually avoid object-oriented (OO) programming whenever possible, as I've found that functional one-shot code taking inputs and returning outputs, with no side effects, using mostly higher order functions, is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude smaller/simpler than OO code.

Also I have a theory that OO itself is what limits most programs to around 1 million lines of code. It's because the human mind can't simulate the state of classes with mutable variables beyond that size. Shoot, I have trouble simulating even a handful of classes now, even with full tracing and a debugger.

I'd like to see us move past LOC to something like a complexity measurement of the intermediate code or tree form.

And on that note, my gut feeling is that none of this even matters. The world's moving towards results-oriented programming, where all that matters is maximizing user satisfaction over cost of development. So acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) should probably be highest priority, then behavior-driven tests (BDD), then unit tests (TDD). On that note, these take at least as long to write as the code itself. I'd even argue that they express the true abstractions of a program, while the code itself is just implementation details. Maybe we should be using user stories implemented per day as the metric.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#187

Post by dasil003 »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #146
Spooky23 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

As someone with Home Depot skills, I 100% agree. I really wish that there was a common distinction. I am not the right person to solve a novel or complex engineering problem. I am the right person to build a product that won't require solving a novel or complex engineering problem. I probably shouldn't be paid like the former, nor should I have to have the qualifications of the former to land a job for the latter.

I think there’s a further subdivision of “hard” which is the fundamental research stuff that pushes the boundaries of CS. Then there’s business problem stuff that’s hard because of scale, surface area and general messiness of the real world. Although the IC salary peaks might not be as high, there is more money overall in the latter, and it’s not as much about raw intellect as it is about moving up and down the abstraction layers, thinking things through and translating technical trade offs to laymen.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#188

Post by antirez »

markus_zhang wrote: post #152
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…

Just curious, do you still code in vacation days?

Nope.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#189

Post by whatshisface »

chx wrote: post #160
whatshisface wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue can easily be fixed by switching from delta LOC to the size of the git diff (number of lines changed). The big problem with this strategy is the huge difference between 10 lines of carefully engineered algorithm code and 10,000 lines of blah API calls and boilerplate. I can write API calls and boilerplate as fast as I can type.

> I can write API calls and boilerplate as fast as I can type. I can write boilerplate much much faster than I can type, either I or the community have scripted that shit :D

I'm sure any shop that counted diff lines would ban editor boilerplate macros due to them being cheating. ;)
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