“The idea that schedules can be shortened in order to reduce cost or speed up delivery is a very common misconception. You‘ll commonly see attempts to require overtime or sacrifice ―less important scheduled tasks (like unit-testing) as a way to reduce delivery dates or increase functionality while keeping the delivery dates as is. Avoid this scenario at all costs. Remind those requesting the changes of the following facts:
- A rushed design schedule leads to poor design, bad documentation and probable Quality Assurance or User Acceptance problems.
- A rushed coding or delivery schedule has a direct relationship to the number of bugs delivered to the users.
- A rushed test schedule leads to poorly tested code and has a direct relationship to the number of testing issues encountered.
- All of the above lead to Production issues which are much more expensive to fix.”