It's hard to really track, define (or even understand) the consumed time on innovative projects. Because time is not the essence.
When I make something really new, I don't consume time, I consume a mix of energy, enthusiasm, slowly built mind patterns and ideas, diverse epiphanies and cultural chocks, all of which took much more time to grow that the hours or days that I spent typing.
Most of my interesting software were born from a few weeks of unfocalized and undedicated thinking, a few hours (usually at nights) of precise writing in my head, followed by days or weeks (sometimes months of a 5 devs teams) of coding which, while it was hard work, seemed to be simply the transfer of an initially complete program from head to disk.
Of course this is somewhat an excessive view but it's really hard to link time (especially "working" time) to the produced software. I'm sure a lot of people here were sometimes in the impression that there were a few hours or days in their coding life that were worth years.
When I make something really new, I don't consume time, I consume a mix of energy, enthusiasm, slowly built mind patterns and ideas, diverse epiphanies and cultural chocks, all of which took much more time to grow that the hours or days that I spent typing.
Most of my interesting software were born from a few weeks of unfocalized and undedicated thinking, a few hours (usually at nights) of precise writing in my head, followed by days or weeks (sometimes months of a 5 devs teams) of coding which, while it was hard work, seemed to be simply the transfer of an initially complete program from head to disk.
Of course this is somewhat an excessive view but it's really hard to link time (especially "working" time) to the produced software. I'm sure a lot of people here were sometimes in the impression that there were a few hours or days in their coding life that were worth years.