Estimate of man years for Moodle development ?

Estimate of man years for Moodle development ?

by Daniel K. Schneider -
Number of replies: 3

Hello

does someone have a rough estimate of the man years that went into Moodle since the beginning, more precisely into the typical distributions that one can download + the documentation.

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Overview says 20 full-time developers and https://moodle.com/careers/ says 72 team members. In the beginning there were less, but the above figures do not include contributed work that later became official plugins, etc.

Moodle is now about 20 years old (I did install a version in 1999 I believe ...)

Is 400 a reasonable figure ?

thanx and greetings ! Daniel

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In reply to Daniel K. Schneider

Re: Estimate of man years for Moodle development ?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Well, if you want more-or-less meaningless statistics about an Open Source project, see https://www.openhub.net/p/moodle/, especially https://www.openhub.net/p/moodle/estimated_cost.

I think that is a bad guess, because it the Moodle source code contains a lot of third-party libraries not written by us, but the cost estimate is just done based on total lines-of-code count.

In reply to Daniel K. Schneider

Re: Estimate of man years for Moodle development ?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
See "How big Moodle really is (code-wise)" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=244442. Warning: From year 2013!
In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Re: Estimate of man years for Moodle development ?

by Daniel K. Schneider -
Thanx Tim an Visvanath ! Both your answers confirm that it is in the range of several hundred person years. That is good enough smile FYI I am writing a manual for a distance teaching university and just wanted to have some evidence that creating some good and useful software takes a lot of time and person years (and the result is not even guaranteed as more recent attempts at creating second generation LMS show .....)