Analysis Failure

My new team leader asked me to cost a fix to a bug the customer found. I looked up the ticket in our system. Somebody had already done an analysis and provided a design for the fix. I said I could code the fix in 3 days. There were a couple tricks to figure out. But hey. The hard part seemed to be done already. It could not take more than 3 days.

I did some additional analysis first. Took almost a whole day. I lined up each of the items in the report to their sources. Then I started trying to lay out how I was going to code up this mapping. I realized that half of the data was missing from the database.

I tracked down the author of the trouble ticket. She told me that the data was missing now, but would be present in a future release. Oops. I was supposed to deliver a fix now. While I could implement that missing part, that would be a big job. I called my team leader and broke the bad news to him.

My team lead said that commitments were made. Umm yeah. They were made based on someone already having done a design, and that the design was feasible. My lead started looking for ways for us to do a smaller scope of work and declare the problem fixed. This did not look like it would end well.