[astura]

>This is absolutely necessary for doing business.

Yep! It sure is.

FWIW, I've spent most of my career producing custom software for paying customers. I've never missed a deadline because the the contacts I've worked on were negotiated appropriately. I've worked a whole total of 1 hour unpaid overtime in my entire career (and that hour was completely my choice).

If the people negotiating these contacts didn't know what they were doing, the companies I've worked for over the years wouldn't be in business anymore. I'm glad I've only worked at functional organizations.

So, yeah, the first few sentences of the article were completely foreign to me, yet the author claims, with confidence, to speak for everyone. Didn't bother reading the rest.

[mnsc]

How were the contracts "appropriately negotiated"? Did you have a fixed number of paid hours upfront where you created detailed requirements together with the customer that you all agreed to? And then you estimated every requirement based on solid experience doing similar work, multiplied by 3.14, got a "let's go" from the customer, sat down and implemented according to requirements and then delivered to customer within budget/in time? And when the customer found out that they wanted a certain feature to work another way. Then you put in a couple of hours to work out the new requirement and set up a new contract, properly estimated and delivered in time/within budget?

[hef19898]

The mind set of working without planning and deadlines, caused by an inability of organisations to do so, is really troublesome. Using Agile as excuse is even worth.

[UK-AL]

There's 3 approaches.

Deadline & No Fixed Scope. Fixed Scope & No Deadline. Deadline & Fixed scope and padding appropriate to uncertainty to hedge risks.

All 3 are admissions you can't estimate accurately.