[heisenbit]

You misunderstand the intention. You don't optimize LOC but you develop software as best as you can. You measure - among other things - LOC and this gives you at least some hard figures in the fuzzy software engineering universe. See it as the Hubble constant - it gives you answers about the universe provided you know it's value.

Then when it comes to understanding your software costs - it helps you to put some numbers to features. Yes it is dark art but so is all other financial magic. When it comes to maintenance or re-engineering software - LOCs and past numbers can be useful but are not the only determinant of future development costs. There is the agile backlog / planning poker school of thought which is certainly an improvement and valuable running the project but when it comes to large scale software projects it is not an answer I would like to rely on when the project needs a price tag before day one.

It is one metric. If you work in any company purely run on metrics - if you ask me - run once you see a better place. If you work in any company not measuring what it does - run now!

[scarejunba]

I'm talking about all of these comments on this page with people talking about how LOC/day is not a good metric for productivity. So? No one's tying your wages to LOC/day.