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Date: 19 Sep 93 00:46:21 GMT
From: agate!tully.CS.Berkeley.EDU!hilfingr@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Paul N. Hilfin
ger)
Subject: Re: Automated Ada Physical Source Lines Counter
Message-ID: <27ga4t$13m@agate.berkeley.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <MUTS.93Sep17095542@compi.hobby.nl>, muts@compi.hobby.nl (Peter Muts
aers) writes:
> 
> Who needs number of lines as a metric anyway. Completely useless IMHO
> and only used to impress managers who don't know a thing on software
> development.

This issue is discussed periodically on the software engineering
bulletin board.   The really annoying thing seems to be that despite all the
perfectly-reasonable QUALITATIVE arguments about why LOC should NOT
be a useful measure of anything (notably effort), it appears
to have some rather strong EMPIRICAL correlation with effort.  That
is, if one can estimate LOC, one can estimate effort to within 10k%
for small k, at least within a given organization.  Don't ask me why;
I don't pretend to know.

P. Hilfinger