Dear Client, Here’s Why That Change Took So Long

I've also seen teams where the Defintion of Done doesn't include any steps at all towards deployment. Done is when someone approves the pull request.

Not surprisingly, it takes longer for those teams to 'complete' a change. In the former case, they are continuously surprised, and angered, by 'requirements' that 'no one' told them about. In the later, they stop halfway, and wonder why everyone is waiting on them, because it's 'development complete'.

It's the auto-mechanic problem; if you don't understand the thing yourself, you have no way to know whether or not you're being taken advantage of. So you tend to just split the difference and maintain a constant, moderate skepticism.

Clients would ask for justification on why something would take 5h of support instead of 2.5h because the previous similar request was done in half the time during the development of the app.

What they don't understand[1] is that if they ask for an urgent fix after deployment, they're going to pay for a developer that had free time this very moment to pull and install the project. That dev then need to read and understand the codebase, make the fix, test it, make a pull request, ask for someone else's billable time to approve the pull requests, merge any conflicts, schedule a release, push the release, test again and document the new feature. And that's if the request is in fact as simple as it look like.

Often, requests look very similar but are very different to each other. "Why does it takes 3 hours to add a button on the sidebar while it takes 1 hour to do it in the content of the FAQ page?" Well, one is done by the content team and require no code or release. The other needs to be done in the code. Etc.

[1] They are told in very simple words that this is how it works.

But in general, the whole letter feels wrong: either the complications of such a trivial change depend entirely on legacy code that isn't responsibility of the current maintainer, and therefore the client knows well how hard and expensive even simple changes are (and this should have been made clear when the project started); or the maintainer is asking the client to pay for developments (refactorings, tests, or a different, more general implementation of the feature) that weren't agreed beforehand.

I mean both are valid depending on what you want. Are you asking me to whip up a script to answer a one-off question or a pipeline to answer that question for every customer every quarter?