Saturday, August 1, 2009

how much time will it take?

I'm one of just a few developers working on a poorly supported software product. The product was barely maintained for the last several years, since it was first released. Many moons ago, it was decided to give the product a complete overhaul, front end and back. Meantime, the main caretaker of the product wisely decided to leave for greener pastures. He was tasked to add as many new features as he possibly could before leaving, and he did so.

He pretty much had free rein over the product while adding enhancements and rewriting code. So far as I can tell, there was no extra pair of eyes checking to see what he did. Management trusted this developer to do everything in the "correct" way. The problem with that lack of oversight is that you are trusting a developer to do everything the way you expect without much (or any) feedback. In many cases, even the product owner doesn't know what to expect, so this imputes impossible, magical abilities on a developer. Naturally, some things are not working correctly, and additions have to be made.

Next thing you know, I've been assigned to finish up the work that was started by the departing developer. There are areas of the application that are incomplete. The code base is quite large, and the application is complicated. I don't know what things work or don't work until I happen to run across them while debugging some other problem.

I've been asked to supply an estimate for how much more time will be required to take this project to completion. So far, I have equivocated, saying that it is very difficult to make that estimate at this point. I am still unfamiliar with a lot of the code base. No one knows how many bugs are in the current iteration of the product. I don't have a specification for what needs to be done, or a checklist of things that have been changed or are still needed.

Truth is, it looks to me like there is still a lot of work ahead, but I can't tell how quickly that can be done. It's even harder to make an estimate because one developer keeps getting pulled away to put out fires in another development effort, so progress is even more unreliable than it usually is in software development.

How do you make an estimate in a case like this? I have a gut feeling for how much more time is needed, but I can't justify it. I'd like to take a few days to run through every feature in the product and see just what is and isn't working. At least then I'd have an idea of how much stuff is still broken. But management would not approve that. I'm supposed to spend every minute developing or bug fixing.

So I can't come up with any justifiable estimate. Meantime, management decides to supply their own deadline. I believe this date was pulled out of thin air; it certainly is not realistic. I don't understand why you'd pull a deadline out of a hat and not expect to be disappointed. I've seen this happen with another project. They kept rescheduling the deadline for months. It makes no sense.

No comments:

Post a Comment