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What takes longer to build, Windows or the Great Pyramid?

[17]29 October 201911 November 2019 [18]thehftguy[19]Leave a comment

Skip to third sections for charts.

On the one hand, the [20]Great Pyramid, one of [21]the 7 Wonders of the
world, built thousands of years ago.

On the other hand, Microsoft Windows, the operating system running
computers around the world.

Let’s measure how much effort they took to build. The “effort” as a
project management term is a unit measured in man*years. It’s self
explanatory, it’s how many people worked on a project times how many
years they worked.

For example if a project takes 2 years for 10 people, the project is
said to take 20 man years.

The Great Pyramid

The construction of the Great Pyramid has been the subject of much
interests. There are a few estimates available in books and research
publications.

One estimate featured in the [22]June 1999 Civil Engineering Magazine.

The total labor expended is 36.7 million days, or approximately
131,200 man-years. Thus the average labor force over the 10-year
duration of the project is therefore 13,200 men.

A second estimate published in German, 1993, by Heribert Illig and
Franz Löhner “Der Bau der Cheops-Pyramide“. With further information on
a website, going into great details about the constructions of
pyramids. Highly recommended if you have an afternoon to waste. [23]How
many workers are necessary to build Khufu’s pyramid?

“Rough calculations give a total number of 6700 workers for the
construction of Khufu’s pyramid. […] The calculations are based on
the minimum of workers necessary to finish the pyramid in 20 years
time.“

Workers were not slaves contrary to a popular belief. Most of those
were highly skilled craftsmen and artisans, not unlike the numerous
people working on Windows.

Both estimates are comparable in total effort, except one aims for
completion in 10 years and the other in 20 years.

We’ll note that a pyramid seems to be a relatively concurrence-friendly
task, numerous workers can cut and transport stones in parallel, unlike
developers trying to work on the same feature in the same codebase.

Microsoft Windows

How much effort did it take to build Windows? There is limited public
information available on that, however we can find out how many lines
of code it is made of and work from there.

There is a cost estimation model called [24]CoCoMo to estimate the
effort to complete a project (see [25]wikipedia for an introduction).
It can be used to estimate the duration of a project with the amount of
people needed and the amount of lines of code created.

Given a completed project, it’s possible to use the model the other way
around to estimate how much effort went into it. From a practical
standpoint, that’s what it would take to redo the project from scratch.

Short version:
Effort [man*months] = 2.8 * ( KLOC ^ 1.2 )
Development Time (months) = 2.5 * ( Effort ^ 0.32 )
Average People Required = Effort / Development Time
KLOC = thousands of lines of code

The constants can be adjusted based on the type of project, we take the
hardest constants here since Windows is a very large project with tight
constraints. It might genuinely be one of the most complex software in
existence, with Office and Visual Studio somewhere in the vicinity.

How many lines of code in Windows?

There is a helpful chart with lines of code and sizes of the teams
working on Windows in the book “[26]The Build Master (amazon)“. Extract
of the numbers [27]here.
Ship Date Product Dev Team Size Test Team Size Lines of Code
Jul-93 NT 1.0 (released as 3.1) 200 140 4-5 million
Sep-94 NT 2.0 (released as 3.5) 300 230 7-8 million
May-95 NT 3.0 (released as 3.51) 450 325 9-10 million
Jul-96 NT 4.0 (released as 4.0) 800 700 11-12 million
Dec-99 NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) 1400 1700 29+ million
Oct-01 NT 5.1 (Windows XP) 1800 2200 40 million
Apr-03 NT 5.2 (Windows Server 2003) 2000 2400 50 million

For Vista (2007) and Windows 7 (2009), it’s 50M and 40M respectively as
reported by [28]multiple sources.

One minor issue, lines of code are going down from Vista onward. A
straight comparison would show that Windows 7 took less effort to
develop than Windows Vista, which is absurd. Let’s consider what the
estimate means, it’s what the development could have been if the
project started from scratch. Of course development didn’t start from
scratch but continued from what already existed.

Removing lines of code in an ancient large codebase is similar work as
adding new lines, possibly harder, so we will factor this as +10M lines
instead of -10M for estimation purposes.
KLOC = 1000 lines of code

Charts

Here’s the numbers.

The Great Pyramid stands at 131200 and 13400 man years as per the two
research papers.

Conclusion

Microsoft Windows took more work to build than the great pyramid. It
reached parity somewhen around Windows 7 (2009) and has surpassed it
since.

This should illustrate the incredible complexity that goes into
software. Software are the largest and most complex constructions
created by mankind so far.

This ought to put things in perspective. Companies and developers are
notoriously struggling to plan projects and execute within some time
and budget. No wonder. It takes hard work to build [DEL: a pyramid
:DEL] software.

To conclude, next time you hear a developer saying one could have built
this or that in a month, refer to this article and ask back if one
could build a pyramid in a year? Not a chance.

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[43]CoCoMo, [44]Microsoft Windows, [45]Project Management

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