-2000 lines of code

I know lines of code as a measure of productivity has been criticized to death here and elsewhere but today I went and did some analysis on past two years of my team members contributions and saw the team members that I know they are productive are modifying code a ton more than others. It can be subtraction of code too but overall more changes correlated with my perception of their contributions. My perception is pretty informed because I'm their…

My favorite anecdote on code removal comes from using Sonar, a static code analysis tool. At a previous job, a pretty smart architect decided that Sonar was a pretty good tool to gauge code quality. He wasn't wrong. However, as a way to improve code quality, management decided to make the continuous integration server demand 90% test code coverage minimum, including branches, and no loss of code coverage over half a percent from maximum, as measured by Sonar. So I…

I had a job interview once where the HR rep asked me how many lines of code I wrote a week. I responded, "On a really good week -1000, I don't remember the exact figure." She was extremely confused by this answer and wanted me to give her a number. So she said, "I'll just put down 10,000." This is also the interview where they refused to continue unless I told them how much money I made (which I don't…

Actually this might prove the opposite. The intention is of course that his removing of 2000 lines of code while improving behavior is a good thing. Therefore a change in number of lines of code is significant. Therefore you should track lines of code. I track lines of code to get a sense for when there's more lines of code than seem necessary so I can go chopping it away until it becomes manageable.