Slashdot Mirror
How Many Developers to Maintain Large Project?
edrugtrader asks: "I am the sole developer for a corporate intranet site. New complex features are always being added, and old features are always being updated. The source code for the site is in very terse PHP, and sums up to about 2MB of code (i would guess around 30,000+ lines). Are there any standards or studies about how many developers it takes to maintain such a large and changing codebase? I am looking for something like, '40,000 lines = 2 full time developers', or '2MB of code = 3 full time developers'. I can currently handle everything fine, but I want to know at what point I should be looking for new hires. I have read studies that a developer writes 1 line of debugged code at the same rate no matter what the language is, so the fact that it is PHP should probably not come into play." As a metric, I think the number of lines per developers may not be perfect, but it is fairly intuitive. Has anyone actually looked into what this ratio is in their shop, particularly for large projects?
How tall is tall ? How far is far ? There can be no objective, or even half close to sorta-objective answer to these kinds of questions.
The number of developers needed migth be proportional to the rate of changes in a codebase, and perhaps to the complexity of the internal and external apis. But the number of lines of code by itself is fairly irrelevant.
It also makes a *huge* difference if these are fresh or experienced developers, if they know the project already or if they need to spend the first months getting acquianted with it, and simply if they're good or not.
I really think there's no substantially better method than simply to estimate from your current situation. Do remember though, that 5 programmers working on a project are typically not 5 times as efficient as one. That's because they have to communicate internally, spend time understanding code which others have written and so on.