Software Engineering and Computer Games

21.4. Counting lines of code

Often people like to measure the progress of a software project in terms of the number of lines of code in the project. One reason for doing this is that it may help you come up with a reasonable estimate for how long a project might take. That is, if you feel that project B is similar to project A, and you know that project A used nA lines of code, then you might guess that when you’ve written nB lines of code on project B, then project B is nB/nA of the way done.

Or, again, if you want to add some feature G to a project and you know that the feature G is similar to a feature F that was already added, then once again, you can gauge your progress on feature G by tracking the ratio of nG to nF, where nG would measure ...