Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!jon From: jon@june.cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: 50,000 lines: a lot or a little? Keywords: software engineering economics, code size, Technology Research Group Message-ID: <8583@june.cs.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jun 89 15:38:44 GMT Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle Lines: 68 Stanley Todd Shebs asks, > Incidentally, the "50K lines == small" statement is a familiar one, but > I've not seen any reliable and up-to-date statistics on program sizes. > Is there a believable chart anywhere of sizes, numbers, and the numbers > of people involved? Charts like Stan mentions turn up in trade magazines from time to time, hard to say how believable or useful they are. In an article on CASE products in ELECTRONIC DESIGN, Jan 12 1989, p. 66, Fig. 1 is a bar chart labelled ``Program Length vs. Target Hardware''. The chart contains this data: Computer type Year Lines of code (thousands) Mainframe 1985 10.2 1989 11.9 Minicomputer 1985 12.9 1989 22.8 Single-User 1985 10.7 1989 18.5 Internally- 1985 14.0 developed 1989 36.8 The figure legend says, ``With system complexity on the rise, the size of software programs is swelling. According to the Technology Research Group, 30% of next year's embedded systems will have over 75,000 lines of code.'' The text of the story gives a clue to the source: ``At the 1988 Design Automation Conference, Andy Rapaport, president of Boston's Technology Research Group, said that 30% of of embedded systems ran over 75,000 lines of code - up 14% from 1985'' (but *that* figure isn't in the chart). Similar tables, also attributed to ``Technology Research Group, 1987'' appear in ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES, March 20, 1989, p. T17. They appear as follows without any further explanation in the text: GEOMETRIC MEAN LENGTH OF CODE BY COMPANY SIZE Base 1985 increase 1987 increase 1989 Large 759 11,927 24% 14,774 25% 18,471 Medium 387 12,059 25% 15,091 35% 20,405 Small 205 11,035 47% 16,222 49% 24,208 DEVELOPMENT OF VERY LARGE PROGRAMS BY COMPANY SIZE Large Medium Small Base 759 387 205 75,000 to 249,999 lines 1985 9% 10% 10% 1987 11% 14% 9% 1989 13% 19% 15% 250,000 lines or more 1985 5% 4% 3% 1987 7% 4% 5% 1989 11% 6% 7% And then there are occasional reports of really big projects, in the million- lines-and-up category; these are usually from the aerospace or military C3I fields. - Jonathan Jacky, University of Washington