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Invalid Project Cost Calculations
Hi,
I have 2 projects listed on Ohloh: Asido (http://www.ohloh.net/projects/5051) and Krumo (http://www.ohloh.net/projects/4995). According to Ohloh, Krumo has 4356 LOC and Asido has 2858 LOC, hence Krumo is evaluated w/ higher project cost. This is incorrect. Asido is clearly the bigger project - even without the comments. If you do a human check -- this means download both projects and just look at them :) -- you will see that Asido is the bigger one. Apart from that, I wrote both of them, and I can say that Krumo took 3 days, while Asido more than a month. The only differenec I see between the two projects is that there's no markup detected for Asido, but as I said Asido is quite bigger than Krumo - even if you count the comments :)
Hi mrasnika,
I think there might just be some confusion over what our project cost calculator is showing.
I did indeed check out the projects and took a look at the code. I used a simple hand inspection to estimate the lines of code, and I also used sloccount to double-check our numbers [sloccount is great, by the way, but if you use it to check our numbers realize that it won't count HTML, CSS, or any JavaScript embedded in your HTML]. I think our analysis engine came up with very precise counts of the lines of code.
It's true that Krumo has a lot of HTML and some CSS and JavaScript, which is why its total lines of code is higher than Asido.
In the project cost calculator, the dropdown lets you choose between Markup Only
(which includes HTML and CSS), or just Code Only
(which includes PHP and JavaScript), or both (the default). If you choose Code Only
, you will see that we counted 1088 lines of code, which is smaller than Asido, as you expected.
The more important point that needs explaining is where in the world our cost numbers come from. We use an industry-standard model called Basic COCOMO. You can read about it in Wikipedia. This calculation uses only the total lines of code to generate its estimates. Also, keep in mind that this model was invented for use with large projects (that is, many years of effort) with full teams of developers, testers, writers, and managers. For small solo projects it is rarely even close to correct.
We provide COCOMO estimates because a lot of people are familiar with them, not because I personally believe COCOMO is awesome :-).
