Ian Bicking: the old part of his blog

Metric fun

Anytime I want to feel like an awesome programmer, I whip out SLOCCount and see what the cost estimate is. For instance, the wiki gives these results:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
python:        3623 (100.00%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 3,623
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 0.77 (9.27)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.49 (5.83)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 1.59
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 104,391
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

For all sorts of reasons that's totally inaccurate. I have no overhead. There are no requirements, meetings, or communication in this project. This isn't deployment-quality code. Who knows what else. But SLOCCount is still always good for a quick ego boost.

Created 01 Jun '04
Modified 14 Dec '04

Comments:

Heh. Sloccount is fun.

I also like having a big unit test suite that runs fairly fast. Whenever I need an ego boost I run it just to see the "Zero Failures, Zero Errors" message. :)
# Alan Green