At work somewhere there's some old code to present various metrics to "management" about what the developers have been up to. One thing it does is calculate "developer of the month", based on lines of code added. My two most recent commits:
143 files changed, 5626 deletions(-)
and then
196 files changed, 7539 deletions(-)
I believe it's time to update that to add the "undeveloper of the month". However, that would mean adding code, and that will taint my stats. Maybe I can give a patch to someone else to apply. :-)
It's taken quite a bit of other refactorings to get to the the point where I could make those two commits. Tomorrow, some new code gets written, but that's only to enable me to go back to the pure negative contribution.
does the "management" know that the metric is meaningless in every way? I hope that's not a real motivation for developers in your team.
Re:developer of the month!=number of lines of code
nicholas on 2008-12-17T10:39:29
Yes. The page is actually a vestige of the previous "regime", from at least 2 years ago, before any of the current development team were here. Management here is actually very good (that's why I joined the company), defending us upwards when needed, and let us get on with doing things properly. They're actually really happy that I'm busy cleaning things up, as less code doing the same work is something they understand and approve of.
Our software is clearly slacking, and therefore hateful. I'm making it fit. (It will still be hateful, after all, it is software, but at least there will be less of it to hate.)
perl -wle'open my $code, "file.c"; while(){ print "$_\n"} close $code;'
pure negative contribution.
It took until Friday to refactor things sufficiently to kill the last 6000 lines I was aiming at.