How to explain to non-technical person why the task will take much longer then they think?

Posted by Mag20 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Mag20
Published on 2011-02-13T15:06:31Z Indexed on 2011/02/13 15:32 UTC
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non-programmers

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estimation

Almost every developer has to answer questions from business side like: Why is going to take 2 days to add this simple contact form?

When developer estimates this task, they may divide it into steps:

make some changes to Database
optimize DB changes for speed
add front end HTML
write server side code
add validation
add client side javascript
use unit tests
make sure SEO is setup is working
implement email confirmation
refactor and optimize the code for speed
...

These maybe hard to explain to non-technical person, who basically sees the whole task as just putting together some HTML and creating a table to store the data. To them it could be 2 hours MAX.

So is there a better way to explain why the estimate is high to non-developer?

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