That's one of the things that agile development should ideally give you (in practice, of course, it's never as easy as it sounds). You make short-term (i.e. pe

That's one of the things that agile development should ideally give you (in practice, of course, it's never as easy as it sounds). You make short-term (i.e. per-iteration, often 1-2 weeks) commitments to get things done, and base the amount you commit to on the amount you got done in the past in that amount of time. Other than that, leave the developers alone and let them get their work done. That gives developers a reasonable target that they can be held accountable for, which tends to make everyone happier. Longer-term commitments (we'll release in 6 months with features X, Y, and Z) on software projects tend to be impossible to make accurately or to live up to, so as an engineer it's impossible to really take them seriously or to be held accountable to them. By making the commitments much smaller and near-term, they're much more reasonable and doable and much more likely to be taken seriously by all parties.