"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1473870.IuNQcqvKbZ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
__/ [ George Ellison (undercover) ] on Thursday 17 August 2006 04:35 \__
Roy Schestowitz wrote:
SLOCCount Web for Debian Sarge
http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/debian-counting/sarge/index.php?menu=Statistics
Ummm, you're off by a factor of 1,000 here, if I read it right.
Oops. My mistake. I have corrected the subject line. Sorry about that....
I had assumed that you were doing a "British million" or something along
those lines. ;)
I've got some bad news and some good news.
Bad news: The site specifies that the figure produced is an upper bound
on the actual project cost. The site also refers you to the FAQ for more
details, but when I clicked, it turned out to be a dead link, so I couldn't
see more details there. The site uses the "Basic COCOMO" metric:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_COCOMO Unfortunately, Basic COCOMO is
said only to be accurate for three types of projects:
<quote>
* Organic projects - are relatively small, simple software projects in
which small teams with good application experience work to a set of less
than rigid requirements.
* Semi-detached projects - are intermediate (in size and complexity)
software projects in which teams with mixed experience levels must meet a
mix of rigid and less than rigid requirements.
* Embedded projects - are software projects that must be developed
within a set of tight hardware, software, and operational constraints.
</quote>
I don't think Debian qualifies as a "small" or "intermediate" project,
nor as an "embedded" one, so I'm not sure how well this metric applies to
the code being measured.
Good news: COCOMO was developed by Barry Boehm during a study of about
sixty software projects. What he discovered during this study is that
personel motivation overwhelms all other factors. I think this is good
advocacy for OSS, as people who work on OSS typically do it out of love,
whereas people who develop CSS typically do it for money.
- Oliver
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