In 16 years of professional software experience, I would say Deadlines are like Promises. They are meant to be broken, almost always. The reason is simple. The

In 16 years of professional software experience, I would say Deadlines are like Promises. They are meant to be broken, almost always. The reason is simple. The ability to define and specify scope/requirements is a really hard problem. Stakeholders change all the time, they change priorities all the time, scope items themselves can be too vague or requirements poorly drafted or the requirements completely change during the lifecycle etc etc. Deadlines are missed mostly because they are not realistic. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have deadlines but we should use them as a ballpark/placeholder to measure output. PS: I have only met deadlines in my projects when I was the stakeholder myself :). Every other time, it is technically a miss or "extension". Fun fact: I have worked on many 4 week deadline projects that went for months, may times. I have worked on 6 months project that went for years (looking at you major investment banks :)). Not just because of me but because of incorrect expectations, scoping and assumptions from the stakeholders. Our job is to obviously setup the right expectations and lock down scope as much as possible but in real world, it is frikin hard.