Benedikt Mas y Parareda and Markus Pizka.
Measuring Productivity Using the Infamous Lines of Code Metric
APSEC 2007 Co-located Workshop Proceedings: SPACE 2007 Workshop. Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), 2007, Nagoya, Japan
Abstract
Nowadays, software must be developed at an everincreasing rate and, at the same time, a low defect count has to be accomplished. To improve in both aspects, an objective and fair benchmark for the productivity of software development projects is inevitably needed.
Lines of Code was one of the first widely used metrics for the size of software systems and the productivity of programmers. Due to inherent shortcomings, a naive measurement of Lines of Code does not yield satisfying results. However, by combining Lines of Code with knowledge about the redundancy contained in every software system and regarding total projects costs, the metric becomes viable and powerful.
The metric “Redundancy-free Source Lines of Code per Effort” is very hard to fake as well as objective and easy to measure. In combination with a second metric, the “Defects per Source Lines of Code”, a fair benchmark for the productivity of software development teams is available.
