End user assistance

Hey,

I need to start off with I have no idea about software development.

I’m the end user of an app platform that was designed for our company. The app is currently operational and its data collection, monitoring and management system with AR features.

We have requested for a new feature to be developed in the platform. the developer has come back to us and said it will take a few months to create the request as it needs to be started from scratch.

long story short, I’ve been googling trying to understand the reasoning of why their timeline projections are so long for the software development.

can someone point me in the right direction on where i can get a better understanding of the development process without and information overload but still enough to understand that their talking about.

cheers

 

Software takes time to create, apparently it took God 7 days to create the Earth!

It's really THAT simple!

 

It sounds like you want us to justify the estimate your contractor provided without giving us any actual information on the application or the features being added to it. But with that said, a few months isn't preposterous by any means. Even simple changes we do in our apps at work can take that long to go through design, copy, dev, approval, QA, etc.

 

and the first day he did it all in the dark... crazy

 

all curiosity that's all.

 

Just ask the contractor for a breakdown of the timeframe. That's what I provide to all my customers when I quote anything for them (in my full-time development job, unrelated to Unity stuff). It tends to be broken down by task showing how long each aspect of the project is being estimated to take.

 

Yeah, you need to get that information from the contractor, then. All we can do is guess, and we can't even provide good guesses without knowing specifics about the project, the new work, the timeline, etc.

But to go back to your original post:

Software development is a process. The process takes time and involves planning architecture, defining data schemas, designing UI, writing code, testing, refactoring, QA, bug fixing, build prep, CI/CD troubleshooting... There's just a ton that goes into it, and each step just takes an amount of time that isn't easily compressible. You can cut things out or write naive code without planning as much, sure, but then you're just offloading that time investment to some point down the road when you're maintaining spaghetti code and chasing down bugs in production.

How deep of an understanding are you looking for here? You know enough about it already to know you can't do it yourself and decided to hire someone else to do it. But now they're telling you something you don't want to hear and your instinct is telling you they're wrong or padding the time out or something. Maybe you really do just want to understand why development takes so long, but every non-technical manager I've ever had ask me to explain a process to them was just looking for a way to trim that process down, and nothing good ever came from it. Seriously, it's happened so many times and it's lead to problems every single time.

If you're satisfied with the contractor's work and the experience of working with them, just let them do what you're paying them to do. If you're not satisfied with something, tell them. Even if it leads to you moving to working with another contractor, at least you'll be armed with the knowledge of what you do want from a contractor.