Billing Boss is powered by 9000 lines of code

We have previously disclosed that Billing Boss is written in Ruby on Rails . It is a very compact framework that allows you to write small and concise code. Most developers know that the more code you write, the higher chance for the introduction of bugs. A measurement of the size of code is lines of code . Just think of lines of code as sentences in an essay. The more sentences you have in an essay, the higher the possibility of grammar and spelling mistakes.

We recently look at the lines of code we have in Billing Boss. It is only 9000 lines of code. This is not counting the actual HTML and CSS used. Just the backend logic that runs when you click a button on any page. See the report below for the exact number. Total lines include blank lines and lines with only comments so the real number to pay attention to is Lines of Code.







As a comparison, A older version of Quickbooks for Mac was reported to have 2 millions lines of code . Windows Vista has 50 million lines of code according to this report. Comparing to other Ruby on Rails application, we are much bigger than Beast (An online forum written in Rails) which claimed to be under 500 lines of code.

Another number you might notice from the embedded report is code coverage. Code coverage is a good measurement of how well an application is tested. We are hovering around 80% meaning that 80% of the 9000 lines of code have been tested using automated unit test scripts. The unit test scripts are ran every time we release a new version to make sure that any changes we made does not break existing features. In fact, our test scripts run right after a developer changes the code and saves the code to our code database. If the developer made a mistake, most of the time the test script can catch it and report it via email to everyone on the team. You can imagine that after a few such incidents, everyone on the team learns to be careful when making changes.

Our code coverage number should be higher when the automated UI tests (using Watir) we have are counted. But due to the limitation of the code coverage tool, we cannot consolidate the data in one report.

While we are proud to have produced so little code (It is a good thing we are not paid by lines of code written), there is still room for improvement. Billing Boss was envisioned to be a simple tool and we are trying every hard to cut things that users do not need. If we can actually keep the lines of code small while introducing new features, we will certainly do that.

Did we mention Billing Boss is free?

Yes. We did mention it at an earlier post.
But, it does not hurt to tell you again and the best things in life should be free. When we started developing the program, we have decided to offer it for free despite revenue pressure. There is absolutely no limitation on what you are do with the free version. If we do release a paid version (no plan yet), we have no intention to cripple the free version and force you to upgrade. Whatever you have to pay for has to be valuable to you. There is little incentive for you to use a commercial online invoicing tool that can be easily replaced by free tools. For example, you can easily do an invoice in Word and Excel, or even PayPal.

One might ask, what is the catch then? If Google has figured out a way to give away things for free and yet still make a profit, we believe we will find the magic combination. For the time being, we will continue to improve Billing Boss and not charge a cent for it.

Stay Tuned.