LOC metrics [LWN.net]

LOC metrics

Posted Feb 21, 2007 23:32 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Who wrote 2.6.20? by pr1268
Parent article: Who wrote 2.6.20?

LOC is a perfectly valid metric; all metrics can be abused, and LOC have suffered more than their due, but well understood and with a little effort (e.g. removing blanks and comments) they are very useful.

Laird and Brennan said it well: LOC are like square meters for an apartment. Sure, 160 m^2 in Madrid are not comparable directly to 160 m^2 in rural Teruel. And even in the same city, if you compare the price of m^2 for luxury attics with old basements you are probably going to make a bad decision. But if you are going to buy a house, you have better know how many m^2 it has, instead of relying on subjective impressions of size.

In this case, what do you propose measuring? Function points? In case you don't know, when you don't have direct fp counts from construction data, you backfire them from... lines of code, by applying a coefficient.

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LOC metrics

Posted Feb 23, 2007 0:00 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

But if you are going to buy a house, you have better know how many m^2 it has, instead of relying on subjective impressions of size.

I'd say just the opposite. If you're looking at the house, your subjective impression of size is what really counts. The square meters in the listing are a cheap estimate -- cheaper than visiting the house -- of how spacious it is.

And so it is with LOC. If you're asking what it would cost to duplicate the development of 2.6.20 from 2.6.19, getting a bunch of professionals to look at the function and give their impression of how many person-hours it would take would be a lot better than counting LOC, but LOC is much cheaper. And history shows that the quality of the estimate you get by multiplying by LOC is quite acceptable.