Some misconceptions about lines of code

Abstract

Source lines of code (SLOC) is perhaps the oldest of software metrics, and still a benchmark for evaluating new ones. Despite the extensive experience with the SLOC metric, there are still a number of misconceptions about it. The paper addresses three of them: (1) that the format of SLOC is relevant to how to properly count it (a simple experiment shows that, in fact, it does not matter), (2) that SLOC is most useful as a predictor of software quality (in fact it is most useful as a covariate of other predictors), and (3) that there is an important inverse relationship between defect density and code size (in fact, this is an arithmetic artifact of plotting bugs-per-SLOC against SLOC).