FTR, Riley, I wasn't sniping at you; I realize you were just the messenger of ridiculous news.
Mike, I've worked on contracts like that, too. In fact, I'm on one now, for a customer that your company probably does extensive work for as well. But things like "changing a threshold value" aren't really engineering issues; at least, they shouldn't be...they should be configurable values in a resource file or config file somewhere, and all possible ranges of values should have been tested prior to release. That was really the point I was trying to make.
If I told my customers that it was going to be a 7-week turnaround when they wanted to change a system setting (like, for instance, "make sure the disk array never gets more than 90% full, instead of 95% like we have now"), I'd have a brief but very exciting exit interview.
The sad part is, my company uses the Scrum process, with 4-week staggered sprints, so the minimum time from standard feature-request to feature release is 8 weeks, 4 for dev and 4 for QA. But even if we had to QRC it, I imagine that BrokenCo could get a change like this out the door in less than 7 weeks.
-BP