Less is more

I accomplished a lot today, although the numbers would indicate otherwise. In truth, it really depends on the numbers you choose to examine.

I made some code changes that fixed some defects. The number of changes and the number of lines of code changed were small. I changed perhaps thirty lines of code across five modules. A manager using lines-of-code or lines-of-code-changed metrics would say that I did very little this day.

The number of defects fixed was small. You could say that it was really only one defect, which expressed itself in several scenarios. So the number-of-defects metric also indicates that I did very little today.

Yet my changes transformed the program from not-useful to useful. The defects prevented us from using the program -- the calculations were wrong -- and my changes fixed the defect. So the metric of "can we use it" went from "no" to "yes", which means a lot to people.

It's not how many lines of code one writes, its which lines of code.