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)?
I think the number of lines added is highly dependent upon the state of the project, the rate of adding to a new project will be much higher than the rate of a starting project.
The work is different between the two – at a large project you usually spend most of the time figuring the relationships between the parts, and only a small amount to actually changing/adding. whereas in a new project – you mostly write… until it’s big enough and the rate decreases.