Comments on: Next Week’s Assignment

By: Marcos Silva Pereira

Marcos Silva Pereira — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:17:24 +0000

I already have found some classes that have more than 15k lines! And I remember a case where the developer was reach the limit size for a Java method (64kb). Oh my God. :-O

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:29:47 +0000

I just found a class with 9,093 lines. I have a few more projects to test. No really big methods, though.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:04:00 +0000

At a previous employer we had a class that was ~13,000 lines long. It was the monolithic “persistence layer”. I’d just like to say: it was like that when I got there.

By: Alex Miler

Alex Miler — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 05:06:48 +0000

Ok, ok, I added a Gravatar. Testing here to see if it works.

By: Alex Miler

Alex Miler — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:52:00 +0000

In case my reference to JavaNCSS was not precise enough above, check out my blog post for a sketch. I got 707 as the longest human-coded method in our source.

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:51:27 +0000

@Mike, there’s no danger here. I’m just looking for the most horrific code out there. Someone’s going to report back with some absurdly huge method clocking in at 23000 lines of code. At those numbers, whether you count comments or not, it’s just comically bad.

And where is your Gravatar, by the way???

By: Michael Easter

Michael Easter — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:46:51 +0000

Fun idea, but I wonder about the metrics of counting “\n”. It could get messy.

I think we need a clarification (a) are comments counted? (b) what about nested classes?

It is certainly easier to just count # of lines but the implications about complexity become dangerous.

By: Alex Miler

Alex Miler — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:43:03 +0000

I've used JavaNCSS for this in the past. Works well, gives you an XML report on your whole code base. The associated Ant stuff is crap though and doesn't work, so don't waste your time. I actually wrote my own Ant task to wrap it and was going to release but never got around to it (and have changed jobs since).

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 02:25:02 +0000

Looks like PMD might be able to help us out also, although I haven’t tried it. I think we may have one or two classes where I work that beat that 6514 lines, but I’ll have to check on Monday to be sure. It’s gonna be close.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 01:27:51 +0000

If you use Eclipse, it’s easy to work the per-method stat out with the plugin at http://metrics.sourceforge.net/

Note that this actually counts lines of code, so it excludes comments and blank lines. Our stats, therefore, are actually WORSE than the below but I couldn’t be bothered working out any other way to calculate lines of SOURCE in a method.

In terms of classes (which is obviously a lot easier; wc -l is your friend), we have a class which staggers over line at 6514 lines of source. This is a servlet controller which manages to neatly include plenty of ‘M’, a fair bit of ‘V’, and more ‘C’ than you could pile on with a shovel. It’s pretty ghastly; thankfully we’re in the middle of rewriting that module now so that should be going down drastically soon.

For methods (measured in LOC, not LOS, per the above), we have a big ugly switching method in another controller, which clocks in at (and I am completely unconvinced this is a coincidence) 666 lines of code (cue spooky music). Unsurprisingly, that also has the highest cyclomatic complexity in the codebase (162!).