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From: sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Identifying high quality software development efforts
Message-ID: <6149@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 1 Nov 90 01:35:11 GMT
References: <1869@shodha.enet.dec.com> <5728@stpstn.UUCP> <1990Oct30.204626.8783@ico.isc.com>
Reply-To: sartin@hplabsz.UUCP (Rob Sartin)
Distribution: na
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Open Systems Software Division
Lines: 14

>First obvious shot: KSLOC doesn't measure program size, useful content, or
>anything else, to any useful level.  That is, it might account for as much

That point was really driven home for me recently.  I was working for
about a month and a half on cleanup and functionality enhancement of
some code.  It turned out that the cleanup opened the door for lots of
neat functionality enhancements for very little cost.  By the time
things were done I had a "productivity" of around -2000 LOC (or NCSS as
we call them) with several pages of documentation describing the new
functionality.  Additionally, though I didn't run metrics, I suspect
complexity metric went down and I know branch coverage went way up in
the tests.

Rob