Everybody always says that they can beat the "10 lines per developer per day" from the "Mythical Man Month", and starting a project, I can usually get a couple hundred lines in in a day.
But at my previous employer, all the developers were very sharp, but it was a large project, over a million lines of code, with very onerous certification requirements, and interfacing with other multiple-million line projects. At some point, as an exercise in curiosity, I plotted lines of code in the shipping product in my group (not counting tools we developed), and sure enough, incrementally, it came to around 12 lines net add per developer per day. Not counting changes, test code, or the fact that developers weren't working on the actual project code every day.
How are other people doing? And what sort of requirements do you face (I imagine its a factor)?
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Steve McConnell gives an interesting statistic in his book "Software Estimation" (p62 Table 5.2) He distinguish between project types (Avionic, Business, Telco, etc) and project size 10 kLOC, 100 kLOC, 250 kLOC. The numbers are given for each combination in LOC/StaffMonth. E.G. Avionic: 200, 50, 40 Intranet Systems (Internal): 4000, 800, 600 Embedded Systems: 300, 70, 60
Which means: eg. for Avionic 250-kLOC project there are 40 (LOC/Month) / 22 (Days/Month) == <2LOC/day!