Severance pay part II

Right, you spotted me. I closed last post with a joke. No, no, the scalping part was ok, I was talking about the estimates. You do have to estimate. And we did. And we went to talk to the management, reporting that the new feature would only require about a couple of days. If the code were reasonably clean and understandable, which is not. At this point we tried to explain why we need to spend five days writing tests and refactoring (actually ten days, as two team members are pairing on it).

The discussion went on like this (M = Manager, T = team):

M: How can we ask our customer to pay twelve days...
T: ...er... fourteen, we already spent a couple of days trying to figure out...
M: Exactly! how can we bill fourteen days for a feature that would normally require two?
T: That's right... but if you want to bill two days, nobody will ever pay us for the remaining twelve...
M: Well... the domain logic is very complicated, we could ask for five days...
T: Yes, but we would still need a couple of days whenever the customer asks to fix or add something just to reckon what's going on under the hood, and we can't always say we need more than we actually do... that would lead us to an unhappy customer... and...
M: OK we'll talk about it next week... I want to understand.

Now, what's the point? he is right. But we are right as well. And the customer too. How will our heroes sort that out? More on this will follow...