Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!udel!princeton!njsmu!telesci!ashepps From: ashepps@telesci.UUCP (Anton C Shepps) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Programmer productivity Keywords: Programmer Productivity Metrics Message-ID: <888@telesci.UUCP> Date: 21 Nov 89 17:25:32 GMT References: Reply-To: ashepps@telesci.UUCP (Anton C Shepps (Tony)) Distribution: na Organization: TeleSciences, Moorestown, NJ Lines: 38 emuleomo@paul.rutgers.edu (Emuleomo) writes: >I heard that the average programmer produces 3-4 lines of *finished* >code a day! >This sounds ridiculously low. I used to work at Unisys formerly Sperry, on the quote kernel unquote of the 1100 family operating system. I estimate that I produced about 3500 lines of code in 4.5 years. This works out to about 3 lines/day. I was kept pretty busy during that time. I wrote about 300 pages of definition, design, and test documents. I was on a few committees. I made a few trips. I attended many classes. There were many meetings, and there were hundreds of design & code reviews. Paid and unpaid overtime. Sadder yet is the number of lines that actually made it into a released product. I estimate that only 1500 of my lines of code actually made it to customers. Now turn this around; figure (conservatively) that it cost Unisys $60,000/year to keep me in salary, benefits, development systems and premium office space. At that rate, each line of code cost them about $77. Each line of code that made it to customers cost them $180. They wonder why the company's gone down the tubes, and why small, mobile companies have been able to cut into their market! > Or is it misleading to try and gauge productivity this way? One night, while still working for Unisys, I sat down and wrote a 700-line program in Turbo Pascal, just for personal use and edification. I became depressed when I realized that I had written more lines that night than I had all year. Of course, Turbo Pascal lines are not equivalent to lines of OS kernel code; but someone using lines of code as a metric would find me 300 times as productive on that night than during the previous day. -- - Anton Shepps - ashepps@telesci.uucp - "Get back to work, you!" -M.Groening -