Why Does Programming Take So Long?

I could write 500 pages on this topic. Instead of coming up with analogies and serious reasons why the software development industry has problems justifying things taking "too long," I thought I'd start a list of annoying reasons that cause delays. These are issues that are almost impossible to relate to management because each incident is fairly insignificant, but the sheer volume of occurrences is staggering. It's impossible to remember them all, so here is a list of irritating things that constantly degrade the quality of life of a software developer. I'll record these when they happen, if I can remember to do so.

Bad Characters
We needed to start a SQL job on our QA DB. We've run this job before. Well, we just replaced our old QA server with a new one. A stored procedure and table were missing on the new server. I had to find a developer who had the source code. He emailed me the source code. When I executed the TSQL to create the table and sproc, I got many "incorrect syntax" errors. That's because there were bad, invisible characters in the TSQL. Since it was impossible to tell where these characters were in the file, I had to delete every whitespace character and add a new one throughout the files. What should have taken two minutes, to start the process, took 30 minutes just to get back to the state of having the process in the first place.

Padding
A record wasn't coming back in a database query. The record was there; we could see it. Could not figure out why it wasn't included in the query. Turns out someone padded the value with spaces to make it 10 characters.

Breakpoint
A team is building some SSIS and we are testing and promoting. Guy checked it in with a breakpoint in the SSIS that wasn’t visible in my VS. I spent an hour checking connections, DTC setup, until I finally noticed “breakpoint hit on task X” in the output window.

Icon Width in VS
I needed to look through my recent changesets, so I found the list by my user ID within Visual Studio. Each time I clicked on a changeset to view its details, the icons next to each file in the changeset got bigger and bigger. Near the end, only three or four rows would fit on the window. Finally, VS threw an exception that the width was too big. After trying a few things, I restarted VS and it was working again.

More to come as they happen...