> I've come to realise that the size of a code base measured by it's features and components is very different to the kind of "size" which you might measure by

> I've come to realise that the size of a code base measured by it's features and components is very different to the kind of "size" which you might measure by line numbers. How different is it, really? Any time I've done the research, it turns out line count correlates pretty strongly with feature complexity. Not perfectly, of course, but given how cheap line count is to produce compared to a quantification of feature complexity (remember function points? that don't even consider complex interactions between features!), it's a pretty damn good metric in my book. (Fun thing you can do: first try to estimate how much a software solution you're intimately familiar with has grown in feature complexity the past year (about 60 % for one project I work with), then look at how much it's line count has increased the same period (exactly 79 %). Previous year I had a project with a 30 % × 15 % pair. The numbers won't match exactly, but they will most likely be in the ballpark. You won't find a project with no complexity growth double its line count, or vice versa.)