Yeah the ratio 10:1 seems reasonable from my experience, and the order-of-magnitude difference is consistent with the 80:20 rule of software engineering that st

Yeah the ratio 10:1 seems reasonable from my experience, and the order-of-magnitude difference is consistent with the 80:20 rule of software engineering that states that the last 20% of work on a project take as much time as the first 80% of the work. There is a really cool tool called `gource` http://gource.io/ http://gource.io/ that allows you to visualize the changes in version control systems like git and hg. I highly recommend you try it on some of your projects---it can help you see who did what. I bet you'll find some surprising things when you watch the history of the project... which parts were done first, which things are new, etc. Is there a genius colleague on your team that wrote the whole thing? Who are your colleagues with good work ethic that consistently push solid bugfix commits and refactoring all over the code base? Here is a sample run of gource on the .tex source code for my linear algebra book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlfrPRe-BeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlfrPRe-BeM here is a more interesting one showing 5 months of git's git history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTMC3g2Xy8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTMC3g2Xy8c