November 14, 2006

Metrics...

Once at work I was working with another developer and he was approached and addressed with the following question:



How long does it take to write a class?



The first thing that popped into my head was my high school senior English Lit class. We were assigned essays every week, and every week we would pose the same question to the teacher:



How long does it have to be?



Well, he would smile very crookedly (sort of devilish as was his way) and say:



How long is a piece of string?



That was how I would have answered the question were I the one being asked, how long to write a class. You can't really even tell me that that is a valid question. You can't time that. You may can break it down and say something like, "How long to write a basic POJO?" And then I might discuss how many fields? Obviously if I have 100 fields on a POJO it will take longer than if I just had 10, even with my super cool IDE (eclipse) that allows me to generate getters and setters, I still have to type out the types and names for my fields if I want them to represent my business object properly.



All this to say that you can't measure everything, and when you try to you end up wasting time. And then you'll have to come up with a way to measure that.



Until next time

Les





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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want my royalty check!

Unknown said...

Royalties? Who do you think you are? Metallica? This ain't no napster.