“Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.” - Kyle Wilson

There’s not really any good way to measure the complexity or scale of a piece of software …. Lines of code is a lousy metric, but it’s the only one we’ve got …. The Feynman report on the Challenger disaster says the shuttle was running 250,000 lines of code. An F-22 fighter jet runs 1.7 million lines of code. What does this tell us about the relative complexity of these programs? Not a whole lot.

I believe that the following statement is an axiom of software development:

It is impossible, by examining any significant piece of completed code, to determine within a factor of two how many man-hours it took to produce that code.

And the corollary:

If you can’t tell how long a piece of code would take when you have the finished product available, what chance do you think you have before the first line of code is written?

Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.

- Kyle Wilson: August 19, 2007: GameArchitect.net: Link.

Via Dave’s Picks: Link.