@cwebber we had an instructor once who gave us a quote, and I don't remember where the quote came from, but it was that "coding is the smallest part of software. It's 50% design and 30% coding and 99.9% long-term maintenance, changes, updates, and bug fixes." he maintained that it doesn't have to be that way. If you take ten times as long on design and development and do it right, then your long term maintenance can be cut to one tenth of that. Of course, almost no company does it that way because they see the initial cost, and make no plans to avoid the long-term cost. Everyone wants it faster and cheaper, and as a result, they get crud. I took this to heart in my career, and when I was doing development, I always quoted a time that was ten times what I thought it would take. They didn't like it, but they accepted it and were happy when I got it down a little bit early. In the process, I avoided having to do a ton of maintenance on my old code.