Lines of Code – The Most Meaningless Metric
$70,000,000(USD) – Seventy Million Dollars, an absolutely meaningless estimate of the cost of an average mid-sized in-house enterprise business application. I say meaningless here for two primary reasons. The first is that this number has almost no relation to the actual cost that an average company would spend to create the software, and second because it has absolutely no relation to what an average business would by or could sell the software for. So where does this perfectly meaningless number come from? It is an estimate based off of one of the mostly ill-conceived metrics in use in the software industry today, Lines of Code (LoC). There is an interesting insidiousness to the measurement, it’s one that everyone seems to recognize as inherently flawed, and yet it’s popularity never seems to waver. In order to really address this issue we need to first understand why Lines of Code is such an ineffective metric for measuring a codebase; once we understand why it’s so bad, it is necessary to look at why we keep using it- what information do we hope to convey by using this metric, and finally, what other terms and metrics might be useful in conveying this information, without the pitfalls of the Lines of Code measurement.