On: Measuring Software Reuse and Deleting Code (2014)

[thomasfl]

Another interesting thing to measure is how much time developers spend editiing each file. A friend of mine did excatly that by installing a logger in the IDE of all members of a team of developers. Turns out large classes are in fact evil!

We wrote a blog about it: http://fagblogg.mesan.no/how-bad-is-smelly-code/

[karlmdavis → thomasfl]

While I intuitively agree with the conclusion there, this analysis definitely doesn't prove it...

Of course more time was spent editing files with more lines of code. In fact, if your entire application was all contained in one file, I am willing to predict that you'd (shockingly) find that all of your time was spent editing that very same file!

[thesz → karlmdavis]

I agree and have to add that really interesting finding would be non-linear dependence between file LOC and editing time.

It also looks like they aren't get rid of outliers.

[hibbelig → thesz]

The outlier had nonlinear dependence. It was the file that proved the point. Why do you want to remove it from consideration?

[thesz → hibbelig]

They found that time of editing is linearly dependent on the size (finding 1). The nonlinearity of the dependence would be interesting.

There is no indication that outliers have any non-linearity.