Mythical man month 10 lines per developer day - how close on large projects?
Everybody always says that they can beat the "10 lines per developer per day" from the "Mythical Man Month", and starting a project, I can usually get a couple hundred lines in in a day.
But at my previous employer, all the developers were very sharp, but it was a large project, over a million lines of code, with very onerous certification requirements, and interfacing with other multiple-million line projects. At some point, as an exercise in curiosity, I plotted lines of code in the shipping product in my group (not counting tools we developed), and sure enough, incrementally, it came to around 12 lines net add per developer per day. Not counting changes, test code, or the fact that developers weren't working on the actual project code every day.
How are other people doing? And what sort of requirements do you face (I imagine its a factor)?
Answer
On one of my current projects, in some modules, I am proud to have contributed a negative line count to the code base. Identifying which areas of code have grown unnecessary complexity and can be simplified with a cleaner and clearer design is a useful skill.
Of course some problems are inherently complex and required complex solutions, but on most large projects areas which have had poorly defined or changing requirements tend to have overly complex solutions with a higher number of issues per line.
Given a problem to solve I much prefer the solution that reduces the line count. Of course, at the start of small project I can generate many more than ten lines of code per day, but I tend not to think of the amount of code that I've written, only what it does and how well it does it. I certainly wouldn't aim to beat ten lines per day or consider it an achievement to do so.