Question

Being relatively new to the software industry I have come across a question of deadline enforcement:

Back in the idyllic age of academia, the deadline was the end of the semester and the penalty was a well defined ‘F’ (or local equivalent). Out here in the real world we need to make code our current and future peers can work with, I face the situation where deadline comes, deadline goes, and the project is still not finished.

Now what? On one extreme we could fire everyone involved, on the other we could richly reward everyone involved.

1. What actions have you seen applied as ‘penalty’ for missed deadline, and which of these eventually resulted in more-good-code?

2. What project-management responses caused the project to fail outright,

3. What responses restored working order and resulted in code that could be maintained afterward?

4. What responses resulted in more-bad-code?

Answer 1

Deadlines are part of a fundamentally wrong idea about how to do software development. People new to, or outside of, the software development industry do not understand this:

Software is done when it is done, no sooner and no later.

If a developer has a task and a week to do it, and it looks like it will take more than a week, nothing can be done to change that. No matter how much harder the developer works, no matter how many people are added to the task, it will still take as long as it takes (in fact adding people usually makes it take longer).

Instead, read up on the agile development process. Software should be developed iteratively, and each iteration should be based on the results of the previous iteration, not on external requirements imposed.

Edit based on the extensive comments below:

I would never argue that developers cannot be held to some kind of delivery expectation. My point is in response to the specific hypothesis which the asker posed – that the nature of software development in business is somehow analogous to schoolwork, or any other kind of work for that matter. I contend that it absolutely is not. “Deadline” implies much more than a simple delivery date. It is a fixed point by which a fixed amount of work must be completed. Software simply does not work that way. I wrote a few more paragraphs explaining why, but honestly if you don’t already believe that, nothing I say is going to convince you.

If you are working on a software project and it is clear you will not be able to reach your deadline, what can you do to rectify that? The answer is well-known by now: practically nothing. You can’t add more people. You can’t “work faster”. It’s just not going to get done on time. You tell the stakeholders, everyone adjusts, and keep working (or not). What, then, did the original date mean?

Anyone who claims software development is analogous to bridge-building or homework or that impending deadlines can still be met if the developers would just get their shit together and work their asses off, are deeply confused about their own profession.