Re: ada-c++ productivity

[csq031@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu]

In article <1991Mar17.142756.25676@ecst.csuchico.edu> rreid@ecst.csuchico.edu (Ralph Reid III) writes:
>I don't know where these companies are digging up these kind of
>unproductive machine operators (I hesitate to call them real
>programmers), but they would never get through the computer science
>program here at Chico State.  It kind of makes me wonder what schools
>they came from, if they even have degrees.  The kind of productivity
>discussed in this article sounds like the level I might expect from
>beginning programming students at a junior college.  I would like to
>know what in this world could reduce a serious programmer's
>productivity to these levels.
>
>-- 
Lines of code per day is an absurd measure at best.  Using it in contracts
is just a way of lulling people who care about such things into thinking
that programmers (and software companies) know what they're doing and
that their output is quantifiable.

The actual situation (as most people know) is that when you set out to
write something non-trivial, that hasn't been done already, you're
much more like Lewis and Clark setting out in canoes than you are like
a machinist putting a block of steel into the lathe. This scares the
living shit out of bean counters.

But anyway, if you measure lines/day after the fact, i.e after the
program has been designed, written, tested, documented, beta-tested, and
accepted as done by the customer, you'll find 3-10 lines per code a
day per programmer to be fairly respectable.  If the program really
works well, most customers wouldn't care if they only did 1 line per
day, so long as it was finished in a timely manner.


--
             Kent Williams --- williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu 
"'Is this heaven?' --- 'No, this is Iowa'" - from the movie "Field of Dreams"
"This isn't heaven, ... this is Cleveland" - Harry Allard, in "The Stupids Die"