[zee007]

You can only get two: 1) Schedule, 2) quality, 3) quantity. So if your client / manager insists on you keeping the schedule you figured out months ago before full information, either quality will have to suffer or you'll have to cut features. There's no other way.

[rwallace]

This doesn't necessarily work as well in practice as it sounds like it should.

Faced with the above, a lot of managers will say 'screw the quality, we have to ship all the features on time, we can patch later.' The problem is that when the manager says that, he's thinking in terms of, well of course all the features will still work except maybe in a few 1% edge cases. But in practice to achieve drastic schedule cuts by sacrificing quality, you often end up with code that only works in a few 1% edge cases and fails in 99% of cases. At this stage the manager will get angry and accuse you of trolling or gross negligence.

So I wouldn't actually use the 'pick two' theory; it's too likely to go horribly wrong.

[zee007]

That'd be one horrible manager. I know they exist, but that's a problem I can't fix :).

[tyw]

up to two. you can also have one, or possibly none.

[zee007]

Yes yes, of course. I forgot the "up to" part :).