Productivity and error rates for Ada projects

[Dave Hawk]

>  Does this mean that if I program in C rather than Ada, I can get
>  the job done with one nineth the expendature in lines of code? That would
>  be an improvement, I'll say. Over the last year, programming in C, I've
>  been turning it out at the rate of 1900 lines a month. If I could get that
>  down to, say 200, that would be great!

I believe Bill's point refers to programmer productivity in large
projects.  He is talking about 1.2-million-line projects.  Normally one
would expect much higher numbers for small one-person projects.
500-700 lines per month in large projects is quite significant.

>    From the November 1988 issue of IEEE Software, page 89 ("Large 
>    Ada Projects Show Productivity Gains"): Productivity ranged 
>    from 550 to 704 lines per staff-month at the 1.2-million-line 
>    level -- a sharp contrast with the average productivity of the 
>    1,500 systems in productivity consultant Lawrence Putnam's 
>    database: only 77 lines per staff-month.

David Hawk
Hewlett-Packard Avondale