Home Original page

Measuring productivity by lines of code

Garry Hodgson garry at sage.att.com
Thu Oct 12 14:25:09 EDT 2000 
Peter Hansen wrote:

> It was not the first time I've been guily of negative productivity
> (counting lines of code produced), as I ended up shrinking a 32K ROM
> image to about 19K in a couple of days...
> 
> To stay a little on-topic, just the other day I rewrote some code
> written by an aspiring electrical engineer who was just learning Python
> (but was experience in C).  I had negative productivity again, after
> removing a huge number of return value tests (judicious use of
> exceptions), explicit argument testing (use getopt module), and program
> logic (went OOP with some parts).
> 
> Not quite a 25-to-1 ratio, but at least two or three to one...  and it's
> maintainable now.

"Peter, you've been doing a fine job, but your productivity metrics
are terrible.  I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go."


-- 
Garry Hodgson                   Once in a while
Senior Hacker                   you can get shown the light
Software Innovation Services    in the strangest of places
AT&T Labs                       if you look at it right
More information about the Python-list mailing list