Tom Breur
6 December 2015
“How soon will this be
done?” “What?!? Is it going to take that
long??” Some managers believe that imposing additional time constraints will
make their staff work harder. They don’t. As DeMarco & Lister have pointed
out a long time ago (Peopleware, 1987): “People under time pressure don’t work better; they just work
faster” (p. 18). I have to give my friend (and writer, check out his much
acclaimed Commitment)
Olav Maassen credit for introducing me to the concept of “dreamlines”:
arbitrary deadlines that are usually supposed to heighten the sense of time
pressure.
When I find out that
managers have been imposing arbitrary ‘deadlines’ on me, not only do I resent
that, it also chips away at my trust. If they make up a deadline now, how
should I interpret a future request to get something done “quickly”?!? And when
I inquire about the need for timeliness, and discover there really isn’t one, I
say to myself: “Oh, right, you mean that dreamline…”
You never produce a thing
faster at no cost. This need not be a financial cost, it could “just” mean at
lower quality, without testing it properly, and of course at the expense of
incurring more technical debt. I will try to share my concerns about this
tradeoff with my manager, and then we can collaborate to determine priorities
and value, to arrive at the “optimal” allocation of resources. Nobody
deliberately creates something slower, but developers may have their priorities
mixed up. Hopefully we’ll manage to clarify that together.
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