Slashdot Mirror
It's Not About Lines of Code
Charles Connell writes: "What makes a programmer highly productive? Is it lines of code per
day? Lines of good code? In this article, I examine the concept of software
productivity. I look at some of the standard definitions for productivity
and show why they are wrong. I then propose a new definition that captures
what programming really is about." Read on for Connell's stab at a better way of evaluating the worth of programmer time.
CT Originally the contents of an article were here but there was
a communication problem resulting in us thinking we were given permission to
print the article here. Now that things have been cleared up, we've linked
the
original article which you can read instead.
Sorry about the inconvenience.
They just don't apply to this art/science. Would Michelangelo's boss have put him to task for square inches/day or pounds of statue/week output?
Dude, buy a copy of DeMarco/Lister's "Peopleware", original edition is circa 1985. Your "revelation" is old news and you offer no substantive recommendations for actually helping management measure or actuate programmer productivity. The Peopleware book is factful and entertaining and reaches no better conclusion than you have. After 17 years, don't you think your postulations should improve on previous work. Have you done any research on prior publications?
They should evaluate programmers by the length of thier beards. =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
In a commercial setting, the awnser is obvious: how much money the software makes is how to measure the programmer's acheivment.
In a different setting, it's not as clear......
As far as "what makes a programmer productive", I know what makes a programmer unproductive... reading Slashdot all day. Back to work, all of you!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Phew, what a long winded way to say: KLOC in any form is a useless metric.
I was rather hoping for positive suggestions regarding better alternative, and especially some shiny references to back them up for when I take them to my boss.
The best metric I've found is simply "Time until feature complete". Just that. Elapsed time between a feature being requested and it going live in the field with no bug reports coming back. Anything else is largely bunk. Trouble with that is that it's very hard for twitchy bosses to deal with the interim stages. "Time to code complete" is easier for them to monitor and deal with, but as anyone who has actually supported a product will know, that's only the beginning of a piece of software's life. Push the time to code complete back by a week, and you can save yourself month of grief later. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This article was rather superficial and should have covered one point instead of several, giving the article a bit more depth. I got the feeling like it was written off the cuff this morning.
(How do I know Danny does more work just because he does the same amount of work in less code. Its like the author follows some reverse logical mistake that he is harping about.)
A very interesting book on this subject is "The Psychology of Computer Programming" by Weinberg. It will get you thinking! I think the "Mythical Man Month" also discusses related topics.
Thanks
Fortunately, you can tell a programmer's personality type by the code they write - it is all explained in this paper by Kevin Marks & Maf Vosburgh
There are various types of programmers around. We've certainly worked with a wide selection. Over the years, we've come to realize that programmers can be divided into various "personality types". You don't stay the same personality-type your whole life though -- as you develop and learn, your approach to programming changes and that change is visible in your code. We're going to look at various functions and how programmers with different personalities would write them.
MacHack attendees have normally been around the block a few times. That means they have learnt various things, like when you're going around the block, it helps to watch where you're going, and be driving a tank. We know that a function has important responsibilities. It needs to check every error code, keep track of every byte it allocates, and that function needs to know how to cope with anything that happens, cleaning up perfectly after itself and returning an error code which explains what went wrong. But in order to write code like this you have to have made mistakes and learned from them. We know we have...
One of the things that makes good programmer full stop is not worrying about trying to measure the imeasurable.
Cheers,
Ian
It compared the lines of code and number of bugs to the salaries. Of course it said it was cheaper to hire a super programmer. But, it found that the only difference between the average programmer and the incompetent programmer was the number of bugs generated, not the lines of code.
People need to be reminded of the high cost of debugging. It takes a long time to track down a bug.
Fight Spammers!
; )
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Your manager doesn't care how many lines of code you do or don't write. He doesn't care what those lines do, or how they work. That's because the client or customer doesn't care about those things. All they do care about is features: Did you add what we needed to add today? Did you finish ahead of schedule or behind it? Will we deliver on time or a week later?
Optimize on your own time. All the non-developers care about is what gets into the final product, and if you meet the list of desired features, then you're productive. End of story.
I work on contracts for commercial software and it is amazing how much code people can write and not comment it. I had to change the functionality of some program once and it took me 5 days to write 3 lines of source. Why? Because I had to wade through code with variable names like "int32 data[7];". As a bonus there were hardcoded numbers to the variable. I had to do hex dumps at one point to see where the data was being used and how.
As I shouldn't even have to say... commmenting your code improves productivity A LOT. Some people say you shouldn't comment code in a commercial product because then you can easily be replaced. My response to that is, why don't you do good work then you won't have to worry about being fired?
If I had an employee who's not commenting his code, that means the next coder that tries to change something is going to spend a bunch of completely unproductive days just trying to figure out what's going on. I think I'd fire the employee because of his incompetence and the amount of time/money he going to make me waste.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Don't get me wrong, commenting your code is a must.
However, I would rather have a programmer who writes easily understood code but doesn't document it well than one who writes well documented but overly complex code.
I've worked on large projects where there was nearly a 1:1 ratio of comments to code, but the comment didn't help you see the big picture because the parts of the application were too far abstracted from reality. And the code was written in strange ways that made it hard for other people to understand.
In summary, the code can and show be written so that most of it documents itself. If the application is well designed and the code is written well, the need for a lot of in-code commenting goes way down. This is assuming we're not talking about assembler, which in my opinion should have a nearly 1:1 ratio of code/comments.
This article seems to raise more questions than it attempts to answer... This is not surprising because the "programmer productivity" has been the subject of many debates.
The proposed definition ("Ability to solve customer problems quickly") seems to ignore several of the good points mentioned earlier. For example, one can be able to solve a customer's problem quickly with an ugly hack. Some undocumented spaghetti code full of black magic may be able to solve one problem quickly, but it would be impossible for anyone to maintain this code later. Or to re-use it for solving someone else's problem.
So who is more productive? The one who solved the problem quickly with an ugly hack or the one who solved the same problem by writing clean, documented and re-usable code?
So it is a pity that what appears to be the conclusion of this article has thrown away the notion of clean and well-documented code mentioned earlier. Maybe a better (but more complex) definition would be: "Ability to solve customer problems quickly and to solve future, similar, problems in a quicker way". The drawback of this definition is that it cannot be measured on the current project, but only when the next one appears.
-Raphaël
I want to add another angle... I managed validation. I viewed our job as reducing 1-800 support calls to zero. In the end, support costs need to be rolled into productivity numbers for develpers also. A couple of support calls from a single user can easily make the gross margin for the sale to that user negative. (And for you "free beer" programmers -- same thing applies, wouldn't you rather write code than spend time supporting users?)
And a closing note: A wise manager once said: "Obviously you want smart, productive people on your project. Note that dumb, unproductive people are relatively harmless, because they are not productive enough to cause much damage. What you need to watch out for are dumb, productive people."
Having any defined metric is (IMHO) a Bad Thing in the long run, for the simple reason that people will sooner or later start gaming the metric. If you reward lines of code you get lots of lines of code. If you reward feature points you get lots of features. For a while I tried more abstract things like "user satisfaction," but that started drifting into the "The Customer Is Always Right" syndrom, with all the feature creep and bloat that goes with it. Using "my satisfaction as your manager" is even worse; brown-nosers are a danger to anyone undertaking a team effort with any element of risk.
So I started wondering: do I realy need to measure productivity at all? Why do I care? The bottom line was, I don't care. I'm not interested in "producivity" any more than I am in "attendence." At this point, I tell people if you want to know what your score is, play a game, open an on line stock market account, or post messages on a web page that keeps track of karma. In this team, the focus is on getting the job done, not on keeping score.
-- MarkusQ
Ummm, this appears to be a regurgitation of a segment from Triumph of the Nerds . With the Microsoft guys saying that productivity should be based on getting a problem solved vs. the IBM guys saying that productivity should be based on LOC or KLOC (thousands of lines of code) or MLOC (millions) etc.
Being a "Data Miner" myself, I can certainly agree with the problem-solving-as-productivity approach, rather than the "how many inner joins can I throw at this to make it look like I am busy" approach.
Actually, the LOC as productivity is so foreign to MY thought process that I can not comprehend why anybody in management or in direct labor would bother to think about it.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
A metric that takes real productivity into account for new projects (the Ingrid example above wasn't a great one since she was maintaining code, not creating it) would be one that measures requirements met versus time. It would of course be up to the manager to say whether the time taken was too long, about right, or less than expected.
A developer that consistently meets requirements with working code, in a timely manner, is a good developer.
Clearly the key to success with this metric is managing your manager's expectations. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Agreed. I think it was Dijkstra who argued that if Lines Of Code are counted, then the number should be viewed as a liability rather than an asset. That is, LOC are not something we produce, but something we spend.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
While I admire the author's brave attempt to establish a new model, I must conclude that he has failed: Applying a quantitative measurement to a qualitative phenomenon is absurd. Do we judge a painter by the number of brushstrokes and conclude that Rothko is lazy and Van Gogh is a diligent worker?
There are many qualitative components by which a programmer can potentially be judged: sheer output, ability to debug others' code, ability to have code debugged by others, ability to create understandable extra-code documentation, affinity for the lifestyle of the person doing the judging (i.e., likes to go out for a beer after work, roots for the same professional sports team, etc...), concentration skills, hygeine, and so on. Attaching metrics to this is nothing short of masturbating one's ego. There is a wonderful allegory to this in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy, in which a self-important researcher attempts to rate a woman's orgasm using measurements on scales developed by the doctor himself.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
isn't who was more productive, Fred or Danny, in the situation above, but who was more productive if Fred wrote his 5000 lines in 5 days and got it done, and Danny wrote his 2500 lines, took him 10 days to get it done.
That's the dilemma facing project managers-- is it better to "get it working now" or "ease extensibility/maintenance later." There is no hard and fast solution. It's different for every project, and often misjudged, in part because you can't see into the future to determine its lifespan. Of course everyone wants two Dannys who get done in 5 days, but that's not the real world scenario.
This is yet another case of trying to quantify something that is qualitiative. It's is pointless to try to measure somebody's quality as a programmer (or as anything else for that matter) by using some numerical assessment. The examples above demonstrate that clearly, but here's a couple more examples:
Which is more valuable, a programmer who churns out 1000 lines of code/day but very reclusive or the one that does 500 but is also good at communicating project directions with others?
Which is more valuable, an inexperienced programmer who learns quickly or an experienced programmer who doesn't?
if you want to know how good a programmer is to ask them the right questions. I'm not sure exactly what those questions are, it depends on what you want out of them. But I've been on many interviews and it's amazed me the vast differences in interview quality. People who are trying to measure the quality of a programmer by "lines of code" are setting themselves for lots of problems.
I think I was asked once to estimate lines of code I've written and I had NO idea. Frankly if somebody did know the answer to that question I'd be concerned. It sounds like somebody who's too busy keep track of the metrics that imply their skill rather than actually doing good work. These are likely the same people who are staring at the clock for the last 15 minutes of the day, constantly estimating the minimum amount they need to do to get by.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
*sigh* Code quality is subjective. Perfect example:
:)
if( 1 == x )
Runs fine, looks butt ugly, but works. Is this of quality? As long as it works? As long as its easily readable?
What about a function that does:
int x ( int a, int b ) { return a/b; }
Runs fast. Can break.
Its all subjective baby. You can't measure it by speed of coding, by lines of code, number of functions, number of bugs..etc... Its a matter of the employeer of the programmer being happy with his output.
Next questin
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short."
-- Blaise Pascal
If anyone deserved to have a programming language named after him, it was the originator of this quote. I just wish it had been a more concise and expressive language.
This guy clearly hasn't read The Mythical Man-Month. He should.
The writer is truly missing the point regarding the purpose of measuring performance regarding lines of code.
Source Lines of Code (LOC or SLOC) are used, by management, to get an understanding of the overall productivity of software engineers in general. It is not an end-all,be-all rule regarding software engineering.
If you take a sampling of 100 good programmers, given clear requirements, and measure their performance, you will be able to determine the overall productivity for a single engineer on a per day/week/month/year basis. This allows managers to make some determinations regarding project planning, enhancements, changes, and yes, to some degree, the performance of engineers.
For example, if I know that my engineering group of X people are capable of contributing 1000 LOC per person per month (per man-month) to a project, then I can better estimate the cost and schedule of a new project. The project's scope is determined by detailing the customer's desires, and developing a break-down of capability. (Things such as R&D, training, and new technologies are identified and have an appropriate risk factor associated with then).
A LOC estimate is associated with each capability, which consequently will produce a timeline and cost.
What the author should have really reflected upon was not how to refine the software productivity metric, but rather how to refine the application of that metric.
About 2 years ago, I was working on my first major project and the project manager called me one day out of nowhere to ask where my progress was (normally we covered this in a weekly meeting). I started giving him percentage estimates based on feature completeness, structure completeness, etc.
So then he asks "how many lines of code do you have?" I tell him that I don't use that as a gauge, I use what I just told him for my progress. Also told him that I don't count lines. He persisted, so I came up with a rough count. He says "so if you say you're at 60%, and have X lines of code written, then you'll have Y lines when you're done, right?"
I had to reiterate (for the third time in that phone call) that LOC means nothing - it may very well be that I only had 100 lines left to put together, but it would tie up the remaining functionality needed (by gluing all my pieces together).
But he just kept coming back and harping on that LOC number, no matter how I tried to persuade him that it was meaningless. He was convinced that this was how he would know how much work went into the project. I guess the 3 weeks of writing very little code and charting out the logic of the app didn't mean much to him. He was taken aback when I told him "I don't just start writing code on day 1, I plan things out"
I feel like some intrinsic part of programmer productivity has been overlooked here. A lot of development is done in teams, working with groups of people. Sometimes a person can be of immense support to a team by providing insight, direction, explaining an existing system, etc... without writing a single line of code. I've known some programmers who never wanted to be bothered and others who became so swamped with people asking them questions that they sometimes had trouble getting their own work done. If Bill asks Rick a question, and Bill's answer takes an hour to explain, but saves Rick a day in wasted implementation, how does that affect the perceived productivity of Bill and Rick? Furthermore, how does this make you look at the productivity of someone who never wants to be bothered or someone who rarely asks questions even when they should?
What is needed are metrics for estimating how hard the problem is, not how hard someone worked to solve it. For estimating the cost of writing a program in the first place, there are various measurements of the problem complexity. One is function points. Google found about 10 pages of links. Here is a FAQ (not approved by the function point users group) that discusses the use of function points to measure productivity, among other things.
The article originally appeared here last week. Sheesh. Don't pretend it's an original Slashdot article if it's not.
For instance, the assumption that lines of code = complexity is false. Ultimately, these are what matters in programming:
How fast is the compiled program
How big is the compiled program
How easy is the source code to read
How stable is the compiled code
How secure is the program
How complete is the feature set
These are all about software quality, not quantity, though. Once you've measured qaulity, the only measure I can see for quantity is, "Did ya get the job done?" The key to measuring a programmers productivity, I think, is to have the programmer keep a log of what he's doing. With that log, the company can insist on improvement, a maintained level, give bonuses for productivity, etc. The only issue I could see with such a log idea is that the higher ups will become so obsessed with the log, and what the programmer is allowed to claim as a job done in the log, that the programmers won't be able to do their job. Oh, well, it was just an idea.
BlackGriffen
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I don't think anyone has ever claimed lines of code per day is a useful or meaningful measure, except of course for pointy haired bosses.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
First off, metrics don't "prove" anything. But in any case, this generally doesn't come up because I don't discuss schedules with clients. I've found it is counter productive.
The closest I'm willing to come is something like:
If you think about it, the only reason I wouldn't be willing to work like this is if I expected to fail. Which I don't.-- MarkusQ
If you need comments in order for your code to make sense, you need to rewrite your code.
My personal measure of coder productivity is as follows:
1. Take all the produced code.
2. Remove all the comments.
3. Present each function to a third party who is unfamiliar with the code, and ask them to explain how it works. If they can't, delete the function.
4. If you have anything left, remove all formatting except linebreaks, and count the *distinct* lines of code. (Bad coders tends to cut+paste, which would lead to overcounting.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I could go the easy route and check every array index in the first array against every array index in all the other arrays. For all I know this is the most efficient way to do this.
But, instead I'm going to research some algorithm books and see if I can't find a more efficient way to retrieve the common elements.
I may very well end up with something that takes a lot longer to code and has less lines of code than the brute-force compare-every-element-against-every-other-element method. But if the payoff is faster, tighter code, then my research and extra coding time will have paid off. However, to the untrained eye, it may look like I'm spending more time to produce less code.
If you are a manager reading this, remeber, the best solution may take longer and contain less code than a suboptimal solution! You have to think hard if you are going to try to quantify this - because nobody knows off the top of his/her head what the best algorithm for everything is. If you have a programmer who regularly researches the efficiency of the algorithms they use you will probably end up with a lot happier customers than if you just have people who bang out code without thinking hard about what they are doing. Unfortunately, doing things the right way makes the programmers job harder to quantify.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The larger teams also have code reviews, so if a programmer's code leaves something to be desired, they can say so in those meetings and send him off to fix the problems they highlight. Said meetings understand that programmers of varying abilities work on the team, but they allow the team to address the most obvious shortcomings in someone's code.
A testing cycle is also required to insure that the programmer's not just saying he completed the requirement. Not much point in submitting code as complete if it doesn't operate as per the requirement's specification.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
However, I still lots of people's effor being measured by HIO (Hours in Office).
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I like commentParserDatabaseCursor. I also like i, j, p, and retval. The length of an identifier should be roughly proportional to the log of the size of its scope. A file scope "i" is an abomination. A loop scope "commentParserDatabaseCursor" is an idiocy.
Boss: How many lines of code did you do today?
Coder: 1
Boss: [next day], how many lines did you do today?
Coder: 1
Boss: [day 3] how many lines did you do today?
Coder: 1
Boss: how come you only do one line per day
Coder: Actually I'm working on the same line.
Boss: How many lines is the damn program?!?
Coder: 1
Boss: You're programming in Perl again arent you...
... that Java is better than Perl. It takes so many more lines of code to do the same simple thing. 'splains everything.
Miko O'Sullivan
You want to measure documentation separately, because it obviously isn't used in the same way as code.
For the code, the metric you'd actually like is something like number of useful, novel expressions.
Copying a section of code doesn't add anything, because the lines aren't novel. Any changes you make to the lines do count, though. Making an existing block of code into a separate procedure adds a novel expression, and the expression is useful if you call it from multiple places (i.e., if the procedure is a useful abstraction). Calling a procedure with a new set of arguments is novel and generally useful.
Basically, you want to know how long the day's work had to be, given the pre-existing code, if it was done optimally.
If you add a penalty for making the code needlessly long, then a day spent reworking bad code to be shorter by combining common expressions, removing extraneous computation, etc, will also be considered productive.
For the documentation, it is easier to consider but harder to quantify. You are now measuring the number of correct and useful pieces of information that a person would get out of reading the commented code. The information may, of course, be obvious from the control structure, implied by the variable names, or actually in comments; since comments add to the length of the code without adding any functionality, using coding idioms that the reader will know (because they're part of the company's style guide or common throughout the code) and informative names is better than putting in comments, unless it is impossible (which is frequently the case).
Of course, it's hard to quantify "pieces of information" and hard to judge objectively what can be gotten out of a block of code, which is one reason this isn't something you can set up cvs to do each day or something.
This means that the ideal block of code, which should be counted as the most possible for a given problem, has these properties: it (or an equivalent block) has to be there in order for the project to do what it's supposed to do; it is not replicated, in whole or in part, anywhere else in the project (if it did, it would do better to call the other part); its behavior is clear from the names of the procedures, variables, and types; any common algorithms are implemented in the standard ways; and unusual algorithms are commented explicitly.
I think this metric would measure productivity effectively. Of course, it doesn't help productivity to actually try to measure it.
Number of lines of code written, highest score wins. In short, why write in 100 lines what you can write in 1,000?
Number of lines of code written, lowest score wins. You end up with your own obfuscated coding contest. You might also find people rewriting other people's work, redesigning APIs and other infrastructure components, for no reason other than to lower their own score. This can lead to total chaos, fights in the parking lot, etc.
Number of good lines of code written a month. What's the definition of "good," and how subjective is it? If it includes comments, then how is the usefulness of a comment determined? I've seen developers write more comments than code, and in the end the comments said nothing useful that would've helped a new developer maintain the code.
Number of bugs fixed in a month. The programmer who spent a month researching the sev 2 bug that was affecting system availability or data integrity for the last three months isn't recognized for his/her achievements, while the intern who fixed 100 bugs pertaining to typos on the website and in the documentation is rewarded.
Number of bugs created in a month, lowest score wins. Nice idea, punishing people for creating bugs, but people might get so paranoid about causing bugs that the turnaround time for code is obscenely high.
Code complexity metric, lowest score wins: All this proves is that the programmer's capable of writing non-complex code but says nothing about the documentation for the code, the overall design of the component or subsystem the programmer was working on, etc.
Number of tasks completed in a month. This screws the guy who's got a hefty task that cannot be divided any further or the programmer waiting on the sysadmin to install the necessary development tools so that he/she can actually get started.
Customer satisfaction. The customers are pissed because the website is unstable, but the rest of the back office system is running perfectly fine. In the end, everyone -- the back-office developers, the database guys -- is punished when only the website people should've been put on call center duty for a week.
Number of customer issues resolved. There's a great incentive here to solve issues with kludgy hacks which, in six months to a year, might leave the company with a very flaky, unmaintainable system.
360-degree input, or "Mutually Assurred Destruction". This was a system IBM used -- still uses? -- where your peers, some picked by you, some by your manager, would fill out a survey and offer opinions about you. The manager would then piece it all together and come up with a result. Like Dilbert called it, it's "mutually-assurred destruction," although I saw it work the exact opposite way many times.
There's so much more that goes into developing and delivering software than just writing lines of code. And the number of lines of code written isn't all that significant if the design sucks, if the documentation is unusable by the people who need it, if the call center people supporting the thing aren't trained properly, or if the systems supporting the website or the database are unstable. How do you put a score next to a name when many of the things contributing to that score are subjective or out of the control of the person being scored? We're not building CD players here!
This guy is "president of CHC-3 Consulting, teaches software engineering to corporate and university audiences, and writes frequently on computer topics". Still he failed to mention function points (an old measure of product size) or use cases (a more modern measure of product size).
He also fails to recognize that programming is a group activity, where one person can be seemingly unproductive, but in reality being vital for the productivity of the group. Typical such persons are mentors, which spends some of their time helping others. Mentors may not produce a single line of code, but still be the most valuable person in the group.
Alistair Cockburn does in his modern classic "Agile Software Development" state that software development is a "Cooperative Game of Invention and Communication". Therefore the productivity is best measured at the team level, since they are, in the end, cooperating.
Also, I think it is quite clear that use cases, or user stories, or whatever you wish to call them, are the best way to describe the wishes of the customer. Fulfilling these wishes are ultimately the only thing that matters.
So, I would say that the number of finished use cases per unit of time, for the whole team, is by far the most meaningful measure of productivity.
Mats
You should strive to make your design docs just good enough for the people who'll be reading them -- the maintenance programmers, who will also have the code. In other words, the design docs are the cliffnotes to the code. The code is always the authoritative design documentation.
BTW, I STRONGLY recommend reading Agile Software Development for anyone who's seriously interested in these issues.
A quick trip to the IEEE's online store, and about $300 bucks will give you all the gory details you need to measure software quality ... provided you consider that software quality synonyous with programmer productivity.
... Hell, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd help.
For example. In grad school, we took the 1992, IEEE Standard for a Software Quality Metrics Methodology, along with GNU Flex, and wrote a program that would slice-n-dice C & C++ programs against a table of measureable metrics for code readability and reusability.
Of course, we had a blast testing it against winning entries from the 9th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. But we also noticed that there were just some things that it would never be able to test. For exmaple, while our little app spotted code that was uncommented, it could not tell us whether or not the comments were useful or relevant.
Point is, judging code and productivity is always (or at least until HR offices are equipped with Beowulf's) going to have a subjective element. Because lets' face it, when it comes down to it, many bosses really only care that the job gets done on-time and under-budget.
Or what's that great line from the movie "War Games"
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Sorry, but that's utter crap. Simple code is every bit as straight forward as comments in english.
You claim that code cannot be tested unless it's documented. Then how do you test the comment that is supposed to be describing the code? It's just as likely to be wrong as the code is itself. Example:
// This code prints foo to the console
printf("bar");
Why should the comment be the true authority? It's no more an authority than the code. I've seen countless examples of the comments being far out of date compared to the code.
The point is that simple code *is* obvious and doesn't need any further comments.
I wasn't talking about the design document, I was talking about the inline documentation, aka comments. I think all code should be designed before it's built and that design should take the form of a document, but that is not the same discussion we were having.
The firm I'm working for hired a contractor to write the system software for their scientific instrument.
... other conditional code // to exit
...
They later hired me.
It is now my job to maintain, expand and rewrite his original code as the device gets further from the prototyping stage.
Here's some metrics for you:
4000 lines of C code
Avg. Variable name length: 3 to 4 characters
Avg. Function Name Length: 3 to 4 characters
Total number of functions (not including state-machine functions): 9
Amount of documentation: nearly 0. Comments are laughable.
Total number of functions, including state-machine functions labelled from stsws0 through stsws30 - 40.
Total number of constant values used without #defines or assigned names: Too many to count.
Amount of documentation of constant values that aren't obviously for buffer/scratch space, but actually do something important: Zero.
Amount of dead code: Current investigation indicates somewhere between 30% and 60%.
Amount of dead code interspered with live code, so it's really difficult to work out what's a dead function, and what's live: All of it.
Level of interweaving of dead code and live code: pretty damn high.
Use of pound-defines for code switching and giving alternate code paths: Zero.
Use of pound-defines to switch blocks on and off that really you want to keep on ALL THE TIME (particularly as the app crashes if you turn them off): 10
Interesting idioms:
-- Use of pound-if(0) and pound-endif to bracket (useless) comment sections, eg:
pound-if(0)
This is a comment.
pound-endif
-- Use of a while loop to do error handling. Eg;
while (TRUE) {
if (condition) { error = 5; break; }
break;
}
if (error)
Number of pound-includes that are actually totally unneeded:
5.
Number of Windows 3.1 programming idioms used: 2 found so far. In a piece of code that *requires* NT4 and as such is Win32 only.
Other interesting idioms: Massively nested if's EVERYWHERE. Very little modularisation. Grabbing an HDC at that start of the app and not letting it go until shutdown, without specifying a Class DC.
The guy REWROTE FROM SCRATCH button controls and edit controls, using WM_MOUSExxx message and WM_CHAR handling, as part of the main frame window. Each edit/button has a separate cut/paste if statement block to handle it. There are about 80 controls on the main screen. This code is cut and pasted for each single control.
And for the final piéce de resistance;
Total number of local variables used: ZERO. 0. Nada. Zilch. EVERYTHING IS A GLOBAL VARIABLE.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Definition:Productivity, '2 a : the act or process of producing b : the creation of utility; especially : the making of goods available for use.' from Mariam Webster
Premise: Productivity cannot be measured except by creation of utility. Utility can be defined as a marginal increment of value. Value can be defined as a unit of production. Productivity then is a measure of increased value. Definitions of value have been attempted from Aristotle onward with varying degrees of acceptance. For business purposes value is found in the bottom line and is predicated upon Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.
If we put aside the idea of a programmer being made to be 'highly' productive as a pipe dream then increments of utility can be put forth as the only available measure of productivity. For example I find I'm more likely to be 'highly' productive the more people like me, do what I want them to do and give me what I want.
If we accept increased utility as a definition of productivity then the final product as it is defined becomes the final abitrator of value. This implies a Goal oriented approach to value based upon measurable increments to utility. This suggests any one programmer is capable of productivity only in so far as s/he is capable of adding to utility.
If this simple definition of productivity is looked at from the view point of Open Source an interesting phenomenon arises in terms of the artistry of programmers. The Renaissance and post Renaissance periods produced leaps in Science and the Arts something akin to what we're presently experience. It's been suggested the creation of perspective drawings birthed the industrial revolution by providing schematics that made possible the production of the machinery of industrialization. A critical aspect of the Renaissance and the eras that followed upon it allowed for the free borrowings from the works of others. Those given to 'copyrighting' their material had little recourse, famed lutanists would hide behind curtains so no one could steal their chops. Bach, Shakespeare and others freely borrowed lines and more from their contemporaries and those who came before them. Bringing this rant to a close it remains to postulate whether the Open Source movement, in multipart harmony, provides a more efficient model for productivity? Well doh!
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship