Developer Productivity Myth: Lines of Code = Productivity

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was preparing for a full sprint, and some managers thought it was a good idea to measure progress by tracking the amount of code each engineer wrote each week. They designed a form that required each engineer to submit every Friday, which included a column for the number of lines of code written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw, believed that measuring productivity by lines of code was absurd. His goal was to write programs that were as small and fast as possible, and the lines of code metric would only encourage engineers to write messy, bloated, and error-prone code.

After adopting a more streamlined algorithm, the new algorithm increased operational speed by nearly 6 times, and as a byproduct, it also reduced about 2000 lines of code. Just after completing the optimization, it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he saw the lines of code column, he thought for a moment and then filled in a number: -2000.

The key to assessing productivity lies in how much output the team produces (helping users, customers, and stakeholders achieve their goals) rather than how much effort is put into producing code. While it is a metric that can roughly track the scale and complexity of a system, it is not very helpful in measuring productivity.

• -2000 Lines Of Code - FOLKLORE🔗