“This project will only take 2 hours”
I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...).We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour max, and it's done. Fire up some perl, loop, xml->hash, take the data needed, print line by line, done... less than an hour."Hey, can you add just this and that, and separate folders for this and a total and rolling sum?"...yeah sure... hour or two."and this and that?"...sure, another hour..."Can this be made for that department to use.. just add a simple gui"...and we've gone from an hour or two, to weeks or months of work.  Nobody wanted a gui application made for "normal users", with all the checks and verifications and documentation and everything when you made a request... the scope was a simple one-off script, and that actually took an hour or two.  This is like requesting a bicycle, than wanting to add a hitch for a boat trailer and making it higway-legal. And the added problem is, that your script never intended to do "all of this", and you either have to rewrite it from scratch, or you software looks like "the Burrow" (from harry potter).