I’d not be too quick to dismiss the estimate. If you were asked to change a couple nested if statements in a prison’s guest management system, probably written in Natural, RPG, and Cold Fusion or some other obscure combo of tools, you’d be silly not to take a step back and be careful with your bidding.
I mean things probably seem to the outside like “it’s just two lines of code”, but if you’re messing with the business logic of releasing prisoners I’m sure you’d want to document how things currently work pretty thoroughly (inferred requirements), test/validate, have customer sign off on the existing functionality, make your change, re-run all the testing, requirements verification, etc. There’s probably a business analyst involved, a programmer, maybe even dedicated test manager, devops (do they have an existing dev/test system?). People in the prison bureau probably take their jobs seriously on paper, don’t want this change to cause more breakage than it fixes, and expressed that in the RFP.
I mean things probably seem to the outside like “it’s just two lines of code”, but if you’re messing with the business logic of releasing prisoners I’m sure you’d want to document how things currently work pretty thoroughly (inferred requirements), test/validate, have customer sign off on the existing functionality, make your change, re-run all the testing, requirements verification, etc. There’s probably a business analyst involved, a programmer, maybe even dedicated test manager, devops (do they have an existing dev/test system?). People in the prison bureau probably take their jobs seriously on paper, don’t want this change to cause more breakage than it fixes, and expressed that in the RFP.