Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

measuring project size

A day or two ago, I was chatting with Aaron and Java came up for some reason. At the same time, I was having to re-checkout a ton of code thanks to Eclipse getting "confused". Watching the checkout files fly by, I couldn't help but notice how many times the word "junit" kept going by (each time, a jar file). Maybe someday the Java world will discover "shared libraries".

And then it occurred to me: you can measure the size of a Java project by how many different copies of JUnit are part of it's source and the source of other packages it depends on.

I think I'm going to start using it as an ad-hoc measure for Java project complexity. "Oh, it's a 3-unit project..." or "Eh, shouldn't be hard to learn, it's only a 1-unit project".