Code on our team laptop rarely takes long at all, what we did was finish the code, test the code, change the code, test again, and then spent 2 weeks driving '06's robot around the hallway, and parallel parking whilst another member was playing Super Metroid on an emulator. No one bothered us because the construction team never finished until after Day 1 at Hofstra.
I find another good XKCD to be
http://xkcd.com/292/