I'm a junior developer in a small company (in a team of 2 developers). Everytime we are asked to implement a new feature:the deadline is set so that we just have time to do the development: there is no error margin (if something takes a little bit more time than expected, we are late) ; almost no time for tests (we are pretty sure there will be bugs) ; no time to refactor anything we are asked to start the development before the features are completely specified, so new things to do show up but the deadline stays as it isThe result is that we deliver software that has bugs and the technical debt keeps growing. We use technology that was considered as a recent version in 2006 or so. There was one release that I remember very well. When we did a demonstration to the boss, he told us What!?? You took two weeks to produce that?! and all we could answer was No, in fact it took us three weeks. I had a meeting with him and another junior developer (that quit the company because of this said meeting!), and he basically told us that he was not happy because what we released was crap. The technical debt and the need to refactor were so big in the parts that we had to modify (but we were told not to refactor because we have no time) that:we had to add a layer of bad code on top of the already bad code;we took much time to try and understand completely incomprehensible code. I don't feel like I'm responsible for this bad release, I think that it's the boss' responsibility to hire good developers that, at least, understand the basic principles of OOP. But hiring juniors is so much less expensive... He is already saying that we are late for the development I'm working on at the moment. He spent more than one year to redesign a tool that was already present in our application, but now he wants us to implement it in two weeks. I personally think that if we want to do it correctly, we need at least one month, or maybe even 6 weeks. I don't know what to do, because I think that the boss thinks that we are just slow and ineffective. That's not the way I will get the raise I think I deserve. Why is it like that? That doesn't seem so hard to understand that if I need x days to complete a task, I can't do it in x/2 days, even if you say please and ask with a smile. That seems so obvious that the deadline will be missed and/or that the quality requirements won't be met. I don't need to know how I can explain to my boss that software development is a longer process that just clicking an icon. Because I hope he already knows that.
Why are deadlines always so short?
refactoring;estimation;technical debt;deadlines