The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

4.6. It Is All in Your Heads

LOC per head is an excellent representation of the development organization's true productivity. If the LOC per head is high, it means that you have a relatively low number of people working on code—you are accomplishing a lot with minimal resources.

If you add more people to the project because the requirements are not being implemented fast enough, then the productivity goes down (the average LOC per head drops). That is because the average number of LOC stays about the same (some new code written, some stale code deleted), while the number of developers goes up. It does not matter how fast individual developers produce code. That is a different issue.

It also does not matter if you are customizing a packaged application or building an application from the ground up. You count every line of code your team actually writes or modifies—but not the lines of code in the actual packaged application. If it is a line of C++ language code for a custom application being developed in-house, you count it. If it is a line within a script or configuration file needed to customize a packaged application, you count it. And if it is a line of new Java code written to integrate your packaged applications into the rest of your IT infrastructure, you count that, too. In fact, if you look at the LOC-per-head metric separately for each code type, I guarantee you will find that the code written to customize and integrate packaged applications is in fact the bane of your ...