This morning Kiwnix told me about the sloccount application, it’s a funny program which will perform some Software Engineering studies on your code and will show you how much your effort would cost.
As a little example, I did run it against my current network-admin code (it took me about a month and a week to rewrite it), here’s the result:
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 4443 (100.00%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 4,443 Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 0.96 (11.49) (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05)) Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 0.53 (6.32) (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38)) Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 1.82 Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 129,331 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40). SLOCCount, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 David A. Wheeler SLOCCount is Open Source Software/Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL. SLOCCount comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions as specified by the GNU GPL license; see the documentation for details. Please credit this data as "generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'."
So I’ve done my work in about 1/10th of the estimated time, and in my spare time! I don’t know whether this means that I’m really really smart, or whether Software Engineering estimates (or this program estimates) are non-functional stuff.
Anyway, I had a laught with this 