Just How Big is GnuCash, Really?

[Linas Vepstas]

Just for fun, I made a graph of the number of lines of code
in GnuCash, as a function of time.

http://www.gnucash.org/en/sizing.phtml


If you've had trouble swimming through that mass of source code,
think of it this way: printed out on paper, and bound into volumes,
it would amount to several dozen copies of Tolstoy's "War and Peace",
roughly a bookshelf-width's worth of source code.

Mind you, this is source code (and docs) crafted and debugged by 
actual humans, this is *not* autogenerated code.  Tools (such as 
glade or g-wrap) can generate gazillions of lines of code 
automatically; I'm not counting those.  Every last line counted 
here was typed in, edited, indented, tweaked, debugged, refactored,
multiple times, by human hands. 

Given that we have about 400 outstanding bugs in bugzilla, that
works out to about one bug per thousand lines of code, or one bug
per 50 pages of printout.  This bug count is actually not atypical
for software projects; its near the norm.

Using the "COCOMO" sizing model, very crudely, this amounts to
about 75 man-years of effort, and thus, assuming American salaries 
and overhead costs, over 5 million dollars to develop.

--linas

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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas at linas.org>
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