Thoughts On: Lines of Code Are Back (And It's Worse Than Before)
Allan MacGregor wrote a good article on Lines of Code
There are two takeaways that I've encountered:
"More code. Worse code. Less understood code."
This is a common problem. It happens a lot when the code base is not structured and developers are being cycled in and out. Code will get duplicated over and over. Multiple design paradigms will be mashed together. The ability to understand how all the pieces work together is lost as brain drain occurs when you lose developers with long term exposure to the code base. Eventually the code devolves into a unmaintainable mess where it takes more developers to maintain it than it did to write it in the first place.
"The bottleneck in software was never typing speed. It was understanding, design, and judgment."
I would expand this to conflicting design and insufficient understanding.