What early Agile knew and Scrum has obliterated is that basic advice you got from your high school or college teachers who pointed out if something is important you can't leave it until the last moment.
The counterargument about deadlines is always some sad sack story about shipping for the holidays or having tax software done in time for the start of the tax season. Those stories are all true, but they have fuck all to do with deadlines.
Continuous Delivery means that if you need something by Friday, the conversation is about the relative risk/reward of shipping the build we're going to do on Tuesday, or the one we did last Tuesday, or one from three weeks ago. Not whether the important features will be done by CoB on Friday. Because the critical bits of the important features were finished over a month ago and now we're just making everything pretty.
What happens is that "the work expands to fill the time" is not just a law that applies to developers, it also applies to management in spades. "Sure, we need this feature, but why don't you hold off on doing that while we do this other thing that feels important but only because I told someone it would happen and I'm too much of a coward to tell anyone that I was wrong about something, and I outrank you so you and your social life are going to pay for my mistakes, not me and mine."
The counterargument about deadlines is always some sad sack story about shipping for the holidays or having tax software done in time for the start of the tax season. Those stories are all true, but they have fuck all to do with deadlines.
Continuous Delivery means that if you need something by Friday, the conversation is about the relative risk/reward of shipping the build we're going to do on Tuesday, or the one we did last Tuesday, or one from three weeks ago. Not whether the important features will be done by CoB on Friday. Because the critical bits of the important features were finished over a month ago and now we're just making everything pretty.
What happens is that "the work expands to fill the time" is not just a law that applies to developers, it also applies to management in spades. "Sure, we need this feature, but why don't you hold off on doing that while we do this other thing that feels important but only because I told someone it would happen and I'm too much of a coward to tell anyone that I was wrong about something, and I outrank you so you and your social life are going to pay for my mistakes, not me and mine."