[flipper35]

Asking this for a friend because this project does not seem that difficult. How long would you take to complete the following project.

You have a flat file that gets dropped onto your server by another application. You have to determine if the file matches the hash. If so, send a good confirmation file. If not, send a corrupt confirmation file. You then have to parse the data and compare with a set of fields from your own invoice in SQL. If there is data missing, you send notification back to the sender what was missing. If the data is complete and it matches your invoice, send it for processing. If it doesn't match send it for review.

The original contract was under two months.

He was just recently thrown into this project and doesn't know what development tools, if any, the other company has. They should find that info out today.

The kicker? this is going on 16 months and so far the developer doesn't know why the data is parsed wrong, doesn't have the file verification automated and is no closer to a working product at this point.

For me, I know this could be done in a short time with a bunch of different tools from Visual Basic and SQL to Adobe ColdFusion.

The file verification would be easy but the developer does not plan to have that complete until it goes live. I have some opinions and none are good at this moment.

I don't understand why it would take so long. Maybe you can find out the flaw in the process that I don't understand?