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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

#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 points. Also, what is up with the random comment about code coverage at the end? That doesnt fit in with the rest of the article either...

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#4
Over the last 2 months I’ve managed about 3k new loc and 90 classes, so that’s about 60ish lines per work day. I don’t feel like I was that productive though and spent a lot of time refactoring. Eg, last 1k lines barely added any features

What do you do to keep up a fast pace in a big project without throwing quality out? They say TDD increases your speed overall, according to a few case studies I found (15% longer to code, but 40% less bugs, so faster finish times overall etc)

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#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 hard problems - the seriously hard problems. Some of this was figuring out why USB couldn't transition from low-speed mode to high-speed mode reliably (USB is quite hard to probe due to frequency), or figuring out why the application crashed one in a million boots.

Some of our most valuable developers committed the least amount of code, but saved our arses more times than I can count.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#7
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…

At one job, I replaced a 10k LOC class with a 20 line function which probably took me to a net negative loc count for that job.

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#8

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…

I am glad I am not the only one to scratch my head...

Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day

#10
If you are doing a good refactoring, you may have a massive negative LoC at the end.

LoC added or removed is not a very good metric for anything.

Except if I see a big negative number on a PR, it is usually a great thing. I still have to check what was removed but it usually mean that things are easier to understand.

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