In todays announcement on the release of CakePHP RC1, Gwoo mentioned the use of Ohlo and in particular, their Journalling feature. I hadn’t heard of Ohlo before, so I took a look. Seems a great idea, and touches along the lines of Github (but nowhere near as well). It’s basically somewhat of a social networking site for open source projects, and taps into each projects source control system to display changesets and activity. You can rate developers and users, and discover other projects of a similar nature, or with similar tags.
Anyway, I tried registering, but got an error when trying to login, and I have yet to receive my validation email. I was about to give up when I found this curious little box near the bottom of the CakePHP project page:
So according to Ohlo, if you wanted to recreate CakePHP in its entirity and copy everything it has, it woul take one person 24 years to complete, and cost nearly $1.4 million!
Now, I’m not taking away from the huge amount of work that has gone into the core by umpteen members of the community, but doesn’t that sound a little bit off to you? It seems they use some sort of mathematical calculation based on lines of code etc. But to be honest I really felt that that made a mockery of both Ohlo as a viable service, and CakePHP as a very successful open source project.
Anyway, I just really felt the need to let you all know about that one. I thought it was funny.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I saw it too and was wondering how they came up with those numbers.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I saw that yesterday and was looking at it myself and thought it was way off and the more link went into how it was calculated. For the most part it’s just guess work based on the little information that they have from the repository.
The cost and time is based off the Basic COCOMO that takes into account for design, specification drafting, reviewing, management overhead, and the actual coding. So basically it is an estimate for a large corporation to do the same project.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Actually if you want to make your self feel under appreciated take http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/ and run it over some of your code.
A fun example of mythical man month but interesting to see what some might value things
Sam D
July 1st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
The numbers of the COCOMO model are estimated using Linear Regression and a training data set of 60 projects back in the late 70s, were IT projects were mostly done for governments organizations and huge companies and took several years and more than 10 programmers full time. The cocomo model used by Ohlo is also very very low level. You can extend the one with 16 different information variables on how the project “behaved” in terms of complexity, team integration, tools, schedule whatsoever, which significantly optimizes the results.
The estimated coefficients of this model are not at all relating to the current software development cycles. They do not include Object Oriented programming and Rapid Development cycles. They are also based on projects written entirely in Assembler, Fortran or C, languages which are known to take lots of lines of code to do the same as PHP or Java would do.
You can effectivly divide the number by 2 or 3 to get a better result.