LOC is a Pointless Metric

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

—Bill Gates

If the head of a major company holds that opinion, what could that imply? To me, it means that you are tracking something that has no direct bearing on the end product. It's related to the product, no doubt about it, but it's a function of other factors, most notably functions or use cases, depending on if you are developing bottom-up or top-down.

The pointlessness of LOC as a metric is directly related to its nebulous nature. What makes a line depends on how you measure it. Is a line truly one line in the source, or is it more like a statement? But what defines a statement? A semicolon in Java? Anything between braces? Something else? When building in assembly, each line of code actually did something to the computer. But how do you count an external library function call? It's an over-simplification to think that a line takes x amout of time to create and test, since each line is almost totally unique from the one preceding it.

A LOC ain't what it used to be. How do you count lines when some of those lines are generated? And then, when your application gets refactored (you do refactor software, don't you), and your LOC goes down, then what? But there's time spent learning the tool to perform the code generation, time spent learning the tool syntax, and that time can't be accounted for until the tool is chosen and integrated.

LOC is considered useful for the reasons that make it useless. You are tracking and managing one of the details of the project as if it has a bearing on the progress of the project. Imagine if my productivity was measured by the feet I walked per day. Less feet = more time at my desk = more productivity. Simple, measurable, but totally inaccurate. Simply because a LOC cannot be defined other than by convention, any use of it as a metric is debatable at best.

So what? Simply, bid per high level requirement. Each requirement costs x dollars to implement, test and maintain. It's not a perfect system, but it would save time and money during analysis by not pretending to perform an estimated analysis on anything other than the functionality that has been requested.