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 :)