A better metric than lines of code
tetha: I think anything directly related to the syntax of a language is a very, very dull metric. I say 'dull', because the LOCs certainly can tell you something about the size of the project (if 3 guys crafted 3 million lines of code for a project, and 3 other guys did the whole thing in 12k lines of code in the same language, something is eery), but it is very hard to make fine statements with them.I much rather would like to see metrics which actually involve the complexity of the code involved, that is, a measure for 'what the user has to keep in his head'. The cyclomatic complexity (~#of paths through a method) is a good example of a step in the right direction in my opinion. I just don't know how one would formalize the complexity of a framework, for example, where one has to remember 'ok, I need to implement this, this and that method in my class and these contracts have to hold' and such :)