This topic we're debating is very well studied. There's lots of good research out there that attempts to correlate how predictive certain attributes of code are

This topic we're debating is very well studied. There's lots of good research out there that attempts to correlate how predictive certain attributes of code are to future bugs. Here's one paper in particular that is a very good read and widely cited: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70232/tr-2005-149.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70232/tr-2005-149.pdf As you would imagine, doing this is quite hard, and quite inconsistent from project to project. Lines of code may bear some correlation to future bugs in code for some projects and languages, but it's far from clear cut that more lines of code == more bugs or more complexity.