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
Agile is fine with fixed due dates. Fixed features on the other hand...

>>jnwats+EL
Exactly this. You create a minimum set of features that must be shipped by the due date. You negotiate on this, adjusting the minimum set or the due date correspondingly.

The desired features beyond the minimum set are accepted as being at risk of remaining unimplemented if the due date can't be shifted further to the right. They become stretch goals that may be achieved by the deadline, or will be worked into a second effort during the maintenance of the system.

Agile (especially some of the stuff in the Lean Software world) is very well-suited to this kind of development. As are the classical evolutionary or iterative & incremental models.