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By this I referring to large software projects. For example, Windows OS is probably 50+ million lines of code. Any programmer hired to help maintain such a system would have to specialize in a certain area of the project. To reiterate my question: How many lines of code per programmer? Is this not even a reasonable way to break down the complexity of a mature project and predict the amount of needed effort?
I'm guessing rather than a chunk of x lines of codes, each programmer is assigned to a team which works on one part of the project. There are many parts to an operating system, it isn't just one big pile of code. Some might work on the scheduler, some on the file system, some on the disk scheduler and so on and so forth. Something like Windows 7 probably has a lot of those teams working at the same time. The amount of code in each part isn't really a measure of anything (other than a measure of the amount of code in each part) since some parts might be very intricate and involved, while other will contain loads of mostly irrelevant boilerplate code.Quote:
Originally Posted by thetinman
O_oQuote:
Is this not even a reasonable way to break down the complexity of a mature project and predict the amount of needed effort?
No. It is not.
You can't even intelligently speculate on how large the implementation for a specific component may grow to match its requirements, and while certain aspects of even a single component don't need to be known by every programmer working on that project, the expected functionality and interactions of the various API that make up a component are basic requirements. True, that doesn't require knowledge of the implementation, but the implementation is just one part of the development process.
Soma
I have no new lines to add to what was said already. Am I fired?