zlacker

>>vimes6+(OP)
Alternate view point - driving projects to a specific deadline allows the other departments in the company to coordinate marketing, packaging, and selling the product. These people don't sit on their hands patiently waiting for engineers to finish building, their work can take many months just as the development does, and sometimes also involves making tradeoffs to deliver on time. No company wants to wait another year after development is finished before they start earning money for it.

>>danpar+V7
Yeah, this is an unfortunate truth that Agile has to confront; there may be hard coordination deadlines. Or, in startups, a financial "runway".

On the other hand, setting a deadline can't force something to be possible, it can only force people to work harder and more painfully towards it. I'm sure the Amazon drone delivery failure had a date target, for example. And there have been plenty of failed "big bang" IT migrations delivered by similar immovable deadlines.

>>pjc50+4f
If anything this is the reality of shipping software that "agile" is designed to handle.

It's so you can (hopefully) have an educated understanding of setting that deadline, and then how you're progressing towards it. It's so if you're not on track to deliver, you can make more educated decisions about cutting scope, or adding resources (yes yes yes, i know).