Mickblog

June 11, 2006

Fun with sloccount

Filed under: Geeky, SLUG — Micksa @ 5:24 am

Has anyone else ever done this besides me?

sloccount is the program used to come up with that estimate of the “cost” of the linux kernel, that made some noise on slashdot way back when.

I have been running it on a few of my projects, to attempt to get an idea of what my programming time is worth. Now I know the figures given by that program include a whole bunch of cruft like documentation and administrative overhead and the like, but even if I multiply by fractional factors to account for these, the results are, um, interesting.

Rather than post the results I got, I’ll show what I’ve been working with:

  • leechnews.pl, a perl usenet binary leecher, is about 70 hours of work.
  • ray is a simple raytracer I wrote. There’s about 50 hours of work in this. (here is a tarball)

I’ve also been using stuff from work but I can’t show you that :)

I’d be interested to see other people’s projects and respective sloccount numbers, if you’re proud/brave enough.

2 Comments

  1. Me blogging about sloccount on libsndfile:

    http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/CodeHacking/libsndfile_sloccount.html

    Comment by Erik — June 11, 2006 @ 11:47 am

  2. You bastard, you’re stealing my blogjuice! :)

    For the un-initiated, there are some things that need to be remembered about the numbers given by sloccount:

    1. There is a default overhead factor of 2.4. That is, for every $1 of programmer cost there is another $1.40 of overhead. Office space, accounting, caffeinated beverages, etc.
    2. The cost covers design, testing, documentation etc., and assumes all this has been done.
    3. The “effort factor” can change according to all sorts of factors - programmer expertise, reliabiltiy requirements etc.

    As a sort of yardstick, I figured out what sloccount considers to be a day of programmers work (including design etc but not overhead), and found a program in my junk box that is about the right size:

    http://mickworld.knobbits.org/viewcvs/misc/primes.cc?rev=1.1&view=markup

    This program apparently would take an average programmer a full day to design, code, test and document.

    Comment by Micksa — June 11, 2006 @ 6:03 pm

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