Some things that look simple can take a very long time.
Over the past week I have been working on something that is much harder than it looks, and I though it might be interesting to share the experience.
The requirement was to paste data in from Excel. This seems like a simple requirement: it is something we do every day, and lots of programs support it.
At a more detailed level, I needed to meet lots of technical requirements.
What looked like a simple requirement has ended up complicated, and is a few days work even under ideal conditions. To develop the new component I used existing components as much as possible, particularly handling the XML and JSON output. The only thing I had to program from scratch was the logic to interpret the data. I have a lot of experience of this type of code. I am completely familiar with the development and test environment. But even under these near-perfect conditions, the component required 750 lines of code, 450 lines of test code, and took me 20 hours to develop. If it was an area I was less familiar with, or where I had fewer existing components, or where the development and test environment was unfamiliar, it would have taken me many times longer, perhaps around 100 hours.
Now that we have this new component, we can now use it to meet other seemingly more complicated requirements really quickly. It only took me about four hours to develop a new bulk emailer component with it (for sending out and following-up on surveys). And I can add that component to new solutions in a matter of minutes.
The time taken to add a new feature depends hugely on the components available and the developer's experience of the situation. Sometimes things that look simple take ages, and things that look hard take no time at all.