It's easy, it will be "done" in 5 minutes

"It's easy, it will be done in 5 minutes" is something that you hear a lot in the development world.  This week, I had a question come through from our QA department that eventually resulted in a small development change.  The time from inception to completion seemed to go really fast, so I decided to see how long it actually took to complete such a small change and the results are below:


8:34 - QA sent an email with a question about requirements.
8:38 - Product responded with clarification.
8:41 - Developer responded with ownership of the change.
8:42 - Developer wrote a failing unit test for the change.
8:43 - Developer made a code change (removed 3 lines of code) to allow the test to be successful.
8:50 - Developer checked in code.
8:54 - Build was successful on Team City
8:55 - Code was deployed to three environments via Octopus Deploy
8:56 - Developer begins verification in all three environments that the change was successful.
9:05 - Developer sent email verification
9:12 - QA verification complete for system 1
9:23 - QA verification complete for system 2

Even though the change was very small and required removing a few lines of code, it still took took 49 minutes to get from an email into an environment where the change can be seen.

So, the next time someone asks why it takes so long to make a change or why you billed what you billed, show them the above or provide the details of your timeline.

I may write a future post and add to this with some real life examples that could have caused this simple change to turn into a multi-hour headache.  The examples that I may introduce are real situations that I have experienced in the last few months and not something that is unrealistic.

peace yo!