Rafael said:
Straw man. This was said in the context of conformance to plans, not
with estimates. Even so, you know very well the there are usually
unexpected issues in the middle of the process that make most
projects say bye bye to deadline.
This sounds as if you had very little experience with fixed-price
contracts. Even though it might not seem that way, but every programming
endeavor is in the end, somewhere up the chain, a fixed-price contract
-- somewhere there is a resource limitation.
If you have a certain amount of resources and want to do something with
them, the situation is usually that if you don't get to a certain stage
by a certain date with the resources you have, (almost) all the effort
is lost. It seems obvious to me that whoever spends this money wants to
reduce this risk as much as possible -- which requires not only cost
limitation on the software development, but also time limitation. Quite
often there are requirements that cause the value created by the
programmers' work to drop sharply after a certain date.
All this can and should be included in the planning -- even the
possibility of unforeseen complications, which may make a change of
plans necessary. But doing so in a planned way usually works much better
for everybody involved.
(Also, FWIW, you may be surprised how well book writers can target into
a certain size, date and budget range. It's not for nothing that most of
the paperbacks are of about the same size. And many of them are on a
fixed price budget.)
I find it surprising how otherwise good programmers often resist to any
kind of planning effort.
Gerhard
