Source lines of code

Source lines of code (SLOC), also known as lines of code (LOC), is a software metric used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program's source code. SLOC is typically used to predict the amount of effort that will be required to develop a program, as well as to estimate programming productivity or maintainability once the software is produced.In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand lines of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS/2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them – hey, if we have – a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less K-LOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh! Anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. Source lines of code (SLOC), also known as lines of code (LOC), is a software metric used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program's source code. SLOC is typically used to predict the amount of effort that will be required to develop a program, as well as to estimate programming productivity or maintainability once the software is produced. Many useful comparisons involve only the order of magnitude of lines of code in a project. Using lines of code to compare a 10,000-line project to a 100,000-line project is far more useful than when comparing a 20,000-line project with a 21,000-line project. While it is debatable exactly how to measure lines of code, discrepancies of an order of magnitude can be clear indicators of software complexity or man-hours. There are two major types of SLOC measures: physical SLOC (LOC) and logical SLOC (LLOC). Specific definitions of these two measures vary, but the most common definition of physical SLOC is a count of lines in the text of the program's source code excluding comment lines. Logical SLOC attempts to measure the number of executable 'statements', but their specific definitions are tied to specific computer languages (one simple logical SLOC measure for C-like programming languages is the number of statement-terminating semicolons). It is much easier to create tools that measure physical SLOC, and physical SLOC definitions are easier to explain. However, physical SLOC measures are sensitive to logically irrelevant formatting and style conventions, while logical SLOC is less sensitive to formatting and style conventions. However, SLOC measures are often stated without giving their definition, and logical SLOC can often be significantly different from physical SLOC.