Neil Batlett has an interesting take on StatSVN and StatCVS:
One problem that startup companies often have is demonstrating to investors that they’re actually doing something productive rather than just pouring away money on office plants, Herman Miller chairs, and playing foosball all day. … One thing you can do is show the evolution of your code over a period of time using a tool like StatSVN.
Lines of code are certainly not the most meaningful numbers, but they are a nice and simple way of demonstrating activity. Sometimes that’s all you need.
And what a relief it is for the developers who have now totally new tools to fake activity. Time to write a small eclipse tool which rearranges methods and attributes now and then and afterwards does a commit. While this tool runs (e.g. every full hour), I will go playing football or looking for new office chairs.
Maggi, you can use graphs and charts to make a point, and you can use them for lying. Just as with words. Every form of communication can be used for deception. I don’t see this as a problem of the software or method, I see it as a problem of the people who use it to deceive.
Well said Richard.
Of course you can fake your stats, and that might fool some investors for a while, but it won’t fool any customers. You need to produce the goods sooner or later. If you can’t, and you lied to your investors… well, they know where you live and they know how to make your life very unpleasant.
“You need to produce the goods sooner or later.” Then why not show the produced goods instead of some code statistics? I thought that was one of the XP ideas.
Maggi: The answer is in Neil’s original post—he referred to projects where the work-in-progress doesn’t make for useful demos.
Not sure what XP has to do with this.
Okay, okay. Forget about the XP part of the comment – just a brain fart because I think a lot about XP these days. Maybe the LOC measure is useful when you have nothing substantial to show.