3 ms·
Complexity is related to size, but is also related to coding style. Comparisons of LOC is meaningless outside of a context,but surprisingly useful inside of a
by mikekchar 10y ago
Complexity is related to size, but is also related to coding style. Comparisons of LOC is meaningless outside of a context,but surprisingly useful inside of a context (and as long as you don't use them as metrics, because they can be gamed too easily).
If you want to see this in action, write a script that will troll your code base and count the total number of uncommented lines of code every day. Draw a graph. Even without knowing anything about your project, I think you will find a very interesting thing -- namely that the code base grows consistently and that the amount it grows per day is a random variable with a normal distribution. (Obviously this only works if you have a consistent number of developers)
If you then do a rolling average (say every 2 weeks), I think you will find something even more interesting: the rate of change will going in one direction or another -- either higher or lower and it will be doing it consistently (normalizing for the number of developers is a bit easier here).
Once you have verified that, you can ponder about what it all means.