A SLOC Counting Standard

Source Lines of Code (SLOC or LOC) is one of the most widely used sizing metrics in industry and literature. It is the key input for most of major cost estimation models such as COCOMO, SLIM, and SEER-SEM. Although the SEI and the IEEE have established SLOC definitions and guidelines to standardize counting practice, inconsistency in SLOC measurements still exists in industry and research. This problem causes the incomparability of SLOC metric among organizations and the inaccuracy of cost estimation. This report presents a set of counting standards that defines what and how to count SLOC. Our experience with the development and use of the USC CodeCount™ toolset, a popular utility that automates the SLOC counting process, suggests that this problem can be alleviated by the use of a reasonable and unambiguous counting standard guide and with the support of a configurable counting tool.