Estimating the time it will take to code something is not easy, it takes experience and also the opinion of more than 1 person. I worked on a project once and I had to code a piece of work that was estimated by someone else - at 10 days. It took about 60 days in reality. Although I was new to the technology, it was still severely underestimated.
How best to avoid such situations? Ensure that you don't just rely on 1 person's opinion. Track a persons' opinion, so over time you know that person A tends to overestimate or person B tends to underestimate. Of course if it was a group exercise (which estimating should be) then this is less relevant.
Agile does this with various methods, but the main thing is that estimates are a team effort not relying on 1 person and that estimate accuracy is tracked and the feedback from that is fed back into the estimation process. In fact this is just common sense.
Amazingly, more often than not this does not happen.
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