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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure that is a direct rectal extraction number not a real number. If there were 500 million lines of code you would have a prima facie case for fraud on the part of the contractor since government contractors are required to use best industry practices and no industry practice supports 10x code expansion.

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Ours is not the only corner of the industry - there are still a great many places where programmer productivity is measured by LOC or some other bullshit metric.

Hell, when I worked at Amazon my manager used sprint story points as individual productivity metrics. Oh God.

Our industry doesn't have a consensus on much of anything, least of all anything regarding counting lines of code.

I can just imagine some clueless bureaucrat bragging to his colleagues that his project has 500 million lines of code.

That's just not true. Contractors are only required to deliver what they proposed and the government agreed to.

Is it possible its different for DoD contractors? I ask because Lockheed in Sunnyvale took some heat (I believe a fine and a restriction on being able to bid on contracts for a period of time) for failing to use 'established industry practice' in the testing and delivery of what ever it was they were delivered. My neighbor at the time worked for them and recounted the gruesome (or in this case non-standard) details. I never really thought to question whether or not it was actually written that way, it just made sense that it would be. When I was with Intel and Intel was building milspec 8080s there were a list of standards that had to be met and all of the test equipment was calibrated based on that as well. Seemed like a pretty natural part of the government contracting business.

So you're saying that Contractors are under no obligation to meet standards? Or just that this contractor would be exempted? Or perhaps software in general would be exempted?

( Apparently NIST is involved somewhat : http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applica... )

Contractors can certainly be under an obligation to meet standards, particularly when this is specified in the contract. However, there is no ISO standard that says "a program shall not reach five hundred million lines of code even if you include all the autogenerated XML and suchlike".

They might be including all of the HTML in addition to all of the library code and all of the code in all of the interpreters and compilers they used, but even that probably comes up short.

Maybe if they include all of the possible HTML the site could generate, but counting potential code seems perverse even beyond the usual cluelessness of the mass media when talking about software.

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