I have been building software for over 20 years and participated in many projects. Usually when you come to write a new feature or starting a new project one of the first thing your manager asks you is a time estimate (if you are lucky) and then will set a deadline for the project completion.
Once a deadline is set everybody start working to meet this date. While setting a deadline helps management plan and have visibility about what is coming from the development pipeline, the act of setting a deadline, especially an aggressive one is a destructive act that in most cases hearts the company in the long run.
Development work consists of much more than writing and testing code, it also consists of research and design. The problem is that while (experienced) developer can estimate the coding effort there is no real way to estimate the research phase, problems you may encounter and how long the design is going to take (if you want to make a good design). How can you really estimate how long it will take you to learn something that you don't know?
If deadlines are aggressive, meeting them usually means that developers will start cutting corners. Do a bad design just because you don't have the time to the right one. If developers are pressed in time they may stick to the bad design choice just because they don't have time to switch the design to a better one after they realize their initial design has flaws.
Other things developers do in order to meet the deadline is to cut down on testing, while doing that hurts the quality of their work. While cutting down on automated testing may let you believe the work is progressing at a higher rate, however you will usually find the problems in production and spend much more time stabilizing the system after it is deployed. You might think you met the deadline shipping the product, but the quality of the product is low and you are going to pay for that in maintenance and reputation.
In addition to all that working to meet deadlines create stress on the developers which is not a healthy environment to be in for a long time, if they move from one deadline to another.
Now don't get me wrong, by not setting a deadline you are not giving a free hand to project to stretch beyond reason. Developers should be aware that their performance is measured but they should also know that they can take the time to produce a high quality product by not cutting corners. In most cases a project can be delayed by few days or weeks without any real consequences to the company, and developers should know that if they have the time they need to produce a good product.
In the exception where you do have a deadline which you cannot postpone the delivery, you should take into consideration that there will quality issues and design flaws. After the delivery you should give developers time to complete the missing tests, do necessary refactoring and bring the product to the desired quality.
See Next post: Sustainable Software Deliverability with Timelines
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