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I agree with this and many times we are emphasizing the wrong question with our processes. Are we shipping on time or are we making good products? If we are making good products then we need to put the quality of products above timeline on occasion. Agile does take away at times longer term feature quality for the needs of short term milestones. i.e. a programmer will hack in a feature to get it done that week, then deal with problems with that implementation for weeks as there is no time to change it. Yet taking another week on that part would have saved a ton of time.

A good product a day late is still a good product. A bad product on time is a world of hurt not just for the programmers, for sales, the users, getting next projects etc. In the end it is good project management and programmers/contractors that can build a solid product, not just deliver on weekly Agile tasks. In the end the quality and product result from where people place their demands. If it is time as the main demand, over shipping a good product, then we know what happens.




It might also be that when the deadline is deemed to be more important than the quality of the product, (which, in real life happens sometimes) the tradeoffs are not made clear to all the stakeholders. Quantifying and communicating that line in a project where it goes from, "leave it out, it's not that big of a deal", to "if we don't do this properly/fix this it will be a huge cluster#&$%" is the definition of a good process/manager, I think.




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