>This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment. Deadlines are artificia

>This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment. Deadlines are artificial constructs in software development, usually built up and justified using completely fictional inputs. It amazes me how many can input assumptions and guesses and then treat the output as some concrete statement of fact. This isn't to use the too common "it'll be done when it's done, man" Dude-ism, but it is a complete cop-out to point to some initial, often agreed-to-under-duress calendar mark as the agreement to unlimited overtime. It never means that. I remember being in an agile meeting once where everyone estimated out some features and gave them durations (span of weeks based essentially on gut feel). These were all studiously entered into the workboard, where the manager then said "okay so that is n hours assuming 6.5 hours of work a day [assuming administrative overhead, bug fixes, etc]. So now if we just put in 9 hours of work a day we'll be done by [some calendar date]". That is the nonsense that yields most "deadlines".