A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic.
The solution is simple: get better at estimating.
Software engineers act as if they're the only ones in the world who are asked to estimate and then held accountable.
It's a skill issue.
replies(6):
The solution is simple: get better at estimating.
Software engineers act as if they're the only ones in the world who are asked to estimate and then held accountable.
It's a skill issue.
What makes software hard to estimate is not so much the work, but how much requirements, priorities and resourcing change on the fly. I've worked in places that did quite strict scrum: once the sprint was planned and agreed to, we pushed back hard on our business area if they wanted to change anything. For practical reasons we didn't outright ban it, but for example, if they wanted something new done "right now" they had to choose something of roughly the same scope to be removed. If they couldn't do that, we'd cancel and re-plan the sprint. They hated having to make that choice, so most things just ended up at the top of the backlog for the next sprint.
The other part was our own management wanting to take people out of the team mid-sprint to work on something else. We never said no, but did say "this means we have to cancel and re-plan the sprint (and tell our business area)".
Basically, we made the people making the changes take responsibility for the impact on deadlines. Our estimates in that scenario were quite good (within the bounds of the sprint, at least).
Of course, the longer the estimation window the less well this works. The only way to estimate accurately is to constrain scope and resources, which is not actually what management/business want.