> but how does one deal with extrinsic deadlines then?
Deliver working software one chunk at a time, however you have to break it down to make it so.
Deliver working software one chunk at a time, however you have to break it down to make it so.
I'm not advocating having engineers estimate the completion date of their daily tasks, I'm just saying estimates aren't totally useless.
For another viewpoint that's not just mine, consider point 6 of the Joel Test, or the methodology of Evidence-Based Scheduling, also by Joel Spolsky (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...).