Re:We’ll Never Know Whether Monorepos Are Better
by vmateixeira on Thursday June 29, 2017 @08:50AM
(#14662827)
One can assume writing documentation and comments is covered by both approaches. Still, the fastest scenario would be the most productive one.
I agree with your view regarding maintenance cost, but I don't think that's what's at stake here. We can go further and try to compare the amount of time needed to fix rat's nest with the amount of time needed to write the software all over again. Covering the rat's nest is in many occasions faster (on which I'm considering more productive) than rewriting.
Re:We’ll Never Know Whether Monorepos Are Better
by hn_throwaway_99 on Thursday June 29, 2017 @10:48PM
(#14668349)
You're never going to get around the fact that most of these things are qualitative assumptions. Is your documentation good? There's really no completely objective way to measure maintainability, because maintainability is often about how easy it is to handle unknown future change requests.
Years ago "function points" were bandied about as a truly objective measure of software output and value. It turned out to be trivially game-able and added 0 value to software development estimation.
I think many of us have known software developers who are incredibly fast, but who write "rat's nest" code that's impossible for anyone else to decipher, or which is very difficult to modify when new requirements come along. Quantifying those attributes is incredibly difficult, but as most time in software is actually spent on maintenance, it usually ends up being more important than a simpler assessment of initial output.