[goatinaboat]

Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty.

It’s funny because that’s exactly an example of what I mean. Real engineering is about compromises and those are highly subjective. What’s the feature we should work on next? What tools should we use? What’s the priority of this bug? Should we refactor this today or take on more tech debt? Ask 10 people and you will get 10 answers, all of which are just as true as any other. Recognising this comes with experience.

[tehwalrus]

Those are all things that fall into the second category (subjective stuff I wouldn't call lying). But saying that something works in X case when it doesn't (or even when you don't know for sure), and everyone estimating four stories based on that assumption, is a big problem.