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30K + 110K = success or failure?


By Larry O'Brien
May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

My recent column on Resolver System’s ResolverOne spreadsheet (March 15, page 32) drew numerous comments, including one from former SD Times columnist, Allen Holub. Allen’s thesis: “I want to take exception to the notion that Python is adequate for a real programming project. The fact that 30K lines of code took 110K lines of tests is a real indictment of the language. My guess is that a significant portion of those tests addressing potential errors that the compiler would have found in C# or Java in turn triggered a flurry of Web postings on sites such as reddit.com and Hacker News on ycombinator.com.”

Allen’s opinion is one I respect, but this position took me aback. It seemed to me self-evident that bringing a commercial application to market in two years counted as a success and that credit should be given to the tactics used, whatever they might be. As for Resolver One being a “real” programming project, I thought that was self-evident, too. Even putting aside its exposure of Python to the end user, it’s a fully functional spreadsheet. Although not directly comparable at the feature level, Steve McConnell recently quoted the 1989-1990 development of Lotus 123 version 3 and Excel 3 at 400K and 649K lines of code with staff efforts of 260 and 50 staff years respectively (tinyurl.com/353svp).

Allen’s own newsletter (regrettably infrequent) quotes a mean level of productivity at 26 LOC/day/person. Personally, I primarily work with corporate teams and it seems to me that primary application sizes of 10-50K lines of code are typical of applications developed in the past decade. All of which seems to count towards the idea that Resolver One is worthy of attention as a programming task. (On the other hand, Chandler Desktop, the Python-based PIM whose rocky development was documented by Scott Rosenberg in “Dreaming in Code” appears to weigh in at more than 500K non-blank, non-comment lines.)

 Related Search Term(s): QA Testing

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