I'm an intern at a development company for an ERP system.
The company is currently in its infancy, and as such the code base that's being developed is relatively new. My task is to write comprehensive unit tests for all back-end operations, starting from scratch. Currently, our back-end codebase occupies about 50MB of data, uncompiled, with about 5 million lines (we like our whitespace).
When I sent my boss a mockup of some of the tests, he said it was perfect, and the rest of them should follow suit. With the formatting that I patterned out, each test occupies more space than the code it's testing, and it's all niched out, so copy, paste, and tidy is not a viable option. in the span of 5 days, I've managed to blanket just over 12% of the code base, and my boss expects me to be done with this in 4 days, or this coming friday. My boss gave me this deadline, I had no say. \personal.
That said, there is no way I'm getting this done. I could easily ask my boss for some more time, and more than likely it would be okay. The problem is that this is off on a logarithmic scale. I need 10 times as much time to get this project done, not just a week or so. Working more hours is not possible.
Both me and my boss highly value this project, and do not want to abandon it. This, however comes with the setback that hearing a month long project will probably deject my boss from this project, and my skills as an intern, and would likely result on him putting me onto things that never make it into production (as I have most of the time before this).
I'm not keen on going back to the burner, where my code won't see the light of day. How do I ask for a (comparatively) enormous amount of time to finish a project?