Question

I’ll do a demo of my code to slightly non-technical audience, and I need to show them what I’ve got in my project (about 15K lines of code). I’m trying to convince them that I’ve spend time on the project and it’s in a good state.

These guys planning to invest money into this product. Therefore I should convince them that this app worth the price that they are going to spend and justify the time I’ve spent, secondly they should see that this is something takes time and I know what I’m doing (basically I need to win their trust) .

• What metrics I can use other than ‘lines of code’? (Maybe lines of comment?)
• What are the best tools (preferably free) to generate a report from .NET Projects?

UPDATE :

Also a way to provide ‘project cost – cocomo’ would be cool, like this one :

FOUND: http://www.cms4site.ru/utility.php?utility=cocomoii will help you to calculate an estimated cost for your project.

Answer 1

An investor only cares about money. Investors start at the exit and work backwards. Knowing this, pitch your project in terms of the return they will get in their investment.

Key points would include:

• Your expertise: Do you know the market you want to sell in to? Are you leveraging your expertise in some way to make the project a reality?
• Risk: Using your already existing code base lowers risk in terms of both time and money. They will probably do technical due diligence to validate your claims, so be honest here.
• Time to Market: Having a code base in place will reduce their time to market, which may be significant.
• Vision: They need to know that there is a future for your product. This is your chance to get them excited!

Investment is about the future, not the past, so understand that you need to achieve what you are promising. The path you trod to get to where you are now may be interesting, but largely irrelevant to the investor. What I’m trying to say is sell the vision, not where you are now or where you’ve been.

Good luck and hope you get what you need!