Path: utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-fos!bnr-public!schow
From: schow@bnr-public.uucp (Stanley Chow)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: 50,000 lines: a lot or a little?
Message-ID: <684@bnr-fos.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jun 89 03:48:00 GMT
References: <8587@june.cs.washington.edu> <17077@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Sender: news@bnr-fos.UUCP
Reply-To: schow%BNR.CA.bitnet@relay.cs.net (Stanley Chow)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada
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In article <17077@bellcore.bellcore.com> duncan@ctt.bellcore.com (Scott Duncan) writes:
 [Commenting on the number of programmers and man-year is very high 
  for a >1Million line project.]
>
>The latter is a problem for me since an industry average of lines per person
>per year is anywhere from 500 to 7000 based on the kind of application. (This
>does NOT count "reused" code and generated code volumes which would drive the
>numbers higher for traditional business data processing applications.)  If we
>use 3000 LOC/yr as an average, then the number of programmers and years seem
>to me to be incredibly large.
>
>Perhaps some aspect of the life-time support and maintenance is being taken
>into account here?  Like I said, I do not recall the context of the numbers.
>I do believe context is vital whenever such numbers are being discussed!
>

I would think that after several years, modules starts to get rewritten,
lots of changes are made. This kind of maintainence activity contributs
to the "productivity" KLOC count but not to the "Project size" count.



Stanley Chow        BitNet:  schow@BNR.CA
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