New-Tech Europe Magazine | Q1 2021

Is code inflation going to ruin your dev operations, and what does compilation time have to do with it?

Dori Exterman. Chief Technical Officer at Incredibuild.

With 2020 coming to an end (what a crazy year, right?), we at Incredibuild are researching the trends most relevant to our company and customers. This past year has taught us that companies wise enough to automate bigger chunks of their operation manage to stay agile and competitive. The best example is game studios, which were expected to release games and versions faster than ever - and triumphed. Like the story of how Milestone released MotoGP™20 During Lockdown. While planning for 2021, I stumbled across this article that uses a report by Sourcegraph and Dimensional Research, reporting that 33% of devs (out of more than 500 surveyed) manage 100x more code than they did in 2010; 18% of devs are reported to have managed 500X

more code then they did in 2010! That's anywhere between 2x to 15x more lines of codes per year. Granted, it doesn't mean that we actually sit and write a hundred times more code than we did a decade ago. A lot has changed, like massive open source code adoption and high increase in target platforms, devices and environments. But for me, this is a game-changer that anyone related to software development needs to consider as we prepare for the future. Code inflation is steep and getting steeper. If this trend is legit, in 2-years' time it will double or even triple, weighing on your resources and infrastructure. The first law of software development Researcher Gerard J. Holzmann wrote about this code inflation trend,

saying: “Software tends to grow with the passage of time, whether or not there is a rational need for it. We can call this the First Law of Software Development.” So yes, it seems that Holzmann took this code inflation trend quite seriously if he went as far as naming it the first law of software development. He carried on examining this theory. To prove this irrational inflation in code he looked into a command named true in Unix® and Unix-based systems. The command grew over time from 0 to 22896, proving his point and then some, showing that even the most trivial code becomes inflated. Just think how gloomy the picture is when it comes to complex products. This can impact your iteration frequency Companies that don't use technology that enables them to

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