James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
SJS wrote:
begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 06:01:14AM -0700:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At an old job the resident programming guru was said to be amazingly
prolific. It was said he could work over a weekend and come back
with 6000 lines of code.
Measured by wc -l?
Easy.
Measured by counting semicolons? Open/close braces? Method calls?
Assignment statements?
Possible.
..
And LOC is a lousy measure anyway, because cut-and-paste is a REALLY
easy way to get that number up there. (As is code generation -- CORBA,
RMI, lexers/parsers, etc., all can really inflate this sort of thing.)
One of my most "productive" days ended up with ~15 lines of new code,
~30 lines of modified code, and ~2000 lines of deleted code. (The
code I was fixing was the result of progressed being measured by the
number of new lines of code added by each programmer.)
Ideally, we'd like to compare "completed features".
Yes, a measurement(definition) of "productivity" is practically impossible.
Not really true.
I used to measure a whole set of things where I worked. Lines of code,
number of checkins, whose lines of code that got corrected by bugfixes, etc.
The measures are not good for evaluation. They *are* good for finding
deviations from the norm that you need to go poke at. I found lots of
anomalies, 80% of which were stupid, 15% of which were something
important, and 5% of which were somebody who needed a talking to.
For example, I found two guys in a circular bugfix that way. I presume
that it was simply shortsightedness (get this off my plate, I don't care
if it screws somebody else up). However, they kept fixing the same bug
in the same way over and over. Of course, it broke the other one who
then fixed his ... ad infinitum. They both had a good talking to.
The problem is that if you use *any* system for measurement, humans will
game it. It's the nature of the beast. The only way to prevent gaming
the system is for there to be a human standing over it going "Stop it.
You're gaming the system rather than playing the game."
-a
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