The Easy Part

Recently, I was helping another part of the team with a project. Or at least it ended up that way. There’s a particular bit of what they’re doing where I have some expertise, so I volunteered to take care of a chunk of the work where I thought I could help out.

One thing I’ve learned through experience (and through testers eyes) is to take a look at the big picture of the problem I’m solving before diving in. For example, let’s say someone asked me to change the text on a button from “Query DB” to “Query Database”. What could be a 30 second task is far from it. First, I need to make sure the button is big enough, I need to check to see if there are other buttons in the application that need similar renaming. I need to make sure the documentation (including screen shots) are updated. I probably need to make sure the localization team knows what to do with the update. Of course, I’ll see if there are any tests that look for this particular string on a button, and after I punch them in the face for testing against a hard coded UI string, I’ll make sure they fix it.

In this case, I needed to add functionality ‘A’ to a system. I know functionality ‘A’ pretty well, but in this case, in order to add ‘A’ correctly, I needed to update ‘B’ – and for ‘B’ to work, I needed to refactor huge chunks of ‘C’. I went to the team and told them that I knew what needed to be done, but it was complex (due to A, B, and C), and that while I was willing to do the work, it would take me a few days to a week to implement and test.

Then they asked me my new favorite estimation question. “How long will it take you to do the easy part.” My answer, of course**, was, “It depends. Which part is the easy part?” To be fair, they meant, how long will ‘A’ take (because they had some insight into B & C), but it was still a fun quote.

** Alan-ism #17: The answer to any sufficiently complex question is, “It depends”.