Negative 2000 lines of code

<p>In the early 80's, the team behind the Lisa software decided to rate developers' productivity by the number of lines of code they would generate. It is a concrete example of what happens when <a class="wikilink" href="/measuring_performance_using_single_criteria/">measuring performance using single criteria</a>. </p> <p>Bill Atkinson quickly realized the number of lines of code was a bad metric, since it incentivizes code with poor performance and bloated architecture.[<a class="litnote tooltip" href="/literature/@hertzfeld1982">@hertzfeld1982<span class="tooltiptext">-2000 Lines Of Code</span></a>]</p> <p>That's why he decided to optimize some part of the code he was working on, and submit a management form claiming he contributed $-2000$ lines of code. </p> <p>That was all it took to review the performance metrics.</p> <p>See: <a class="wikilink" href="/quantitative_performance_measurements_produce_undesired_outputs/">quantitative performance measurements produce undesired outputs</a></p> <p>Found here: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html and referred by many different sources.</p>