It’s just the way of the world, but clients and potential clients of software development often use particular wording in order to imply that some work should be very inexpensive to complete. Here’s just a few examples from last couple of weeks that were infuriating and humorous all at the same time:
- “Minor modification needed”. Often a change is clearly a minor modification, but in many functionality areas these words shouldn’t be used until at least a short investigation is undertaken.
- “Can this be fixed?” in reference to a functionality item that was never mentioned before. When it’s totally new functionality being requested, it’s not a fix, its new work!
- “So users can finally do X” in relation to an IT initiated environment change where users could do X with no problems before the environment change.
- “for a very standard X environment” implying it’s going to be a small task to implement.
Yes, I’m bitching here and its pathetic. I just think trying to preemptively minimize a task by using wording that implies the task is small is counter-productive for all parties. It may well be a small task, but let’s figure that out together. We are likely to arrive at a unique solution that is both inexpensive and satisfies all of the requirements.
PS: I’m sure Software Developers unconsciously also use terminology that highlight the uncertainty of software development estimates which frustrates the crap out of buyers of software development services.