How much work does it take to change on a program, from "Monday to Sunday" to whichever 7 days in a row?

It would depend on the individual program.

It can be done easily if kept as a part of setting / something similar in the program. If not it depends on at how many places it has been used in the program.

I’ve done this! Yay…

Well mostly, it was a little different. We had a program so everyone could see who was in the office. Each person filled in their own schedule and since most people worked Monday – Friday, 8 – 5, we added a feature to fill in a dummy schedule with one click to speed things up. Then you could modify it from there. So even if you didn’t work M-F, 8–5, it took some of the work out.

People who didn’t work M-F 8–5 were pissed because they had to do aaaaaallll that work to change their schedule once a month. I mean, it must have taken 3–5 minutes from their highly productive day.

So there was a request to let the 5 days start anywhere during the week and repeat throughout the month. Great, sounds good.

Here’s how it went for me, if I remember right.

- make a setting so people can change the start of their week to whatever day they want before we “seed” the schedule
– make the change so when they click the “fill schedule” button, it now asks what day they’d like to start the week on in a nifty little menu.
– required a change in how we found the “first work day” since we can no longer assume it’s the first Monday, so separated that out into it’s own piece
– chased down random bugs with things like figuring the last day of the month and anything that assumed beginnings and ends in the seeding part of the program.

And so we added that, tested it, and launched it.

And almost immediately started getting requests for things like 4 day weeks with 10 hour days and did you know Jenny doesn’t work Wednesdays?

So we scrapped the whole seeding idea and built something to store a default schedule for each individual which was filled in automatically and they just had to approve and update for vacations. This was a much larger undertaking, but got it done and tested and launched.

People still complained about having to do it.

So there’s no single answer unfortunately, but I’d be willing to bet there are defaults there for a reason.

As @janbb wrote, it depends on how the existing program works, and how familiar the programmer doing the change is with the source code of (and/or tools for) the program. Could be very simple, or annoyingly complex.

It should not be very difficult. Somewhere in the program there is likely to be a database request giving the start and end dates of the data to be retrieved. The solution may be as simple as changing the start and end dates for, without having to change the way the data is displayed.

Ok. Thanks all. I’ll let you @LostInParadise ( who says it should be easy) and the rest of you discuss it.