"Soooo Bob, how's it going?" said Morris. If he only wore suspenders then it could have been a scene straight from Office Space.

"I know you and the team have been working hard this year. You've got a great architecture, development is running smoothly and you've made the date for all three iterations. The customer is happy too. The early releases have been passing all the tests and our customer has really learned to trust us. There is just one thing..."

"I'm going to need you to", pausing and slowing his speech, "forget about quality and for the rest of this year, and just hack it out. Forget quality, we need speed!"

Silence!

Bob reaches down and picks his chin up with his right hand, physically lifting it to close his mouth again. After a short pause, he mumbles "Errrr, OK. We'll see what we can do." The irony is that Morris had earlier that year stood in front of the executives and said "The bottom line is that quality makes us go faster!" Everyone had smiled and applauded his efforts with agile software development.

So what is wrong with this? Well Morris is a rotten manager but that's not really what I'm getting at. Morris has destroyed his staff's morale in just two sentences. But there is more. What's wrong in Morris' organization is that they are measuring the wrong thing. At the executive level, they are measuring "code complete." It is the code complete date which gets reported on the wider program level. Meanwhile, the marketing guys are asking for too much and failing to recognize thorough analysis and objective velocity data. You can't put quart into a pint pot. So what to do? "Hey, just hack it and as long as we're only measured on code complete then we're home free", thinks Morris.

Well yes and no. Morris may be a natural talent at management misdirection. He successfully sets the developers up for failure. If they miss the date - they fail and he can claim they were "too academic" and "perfectionists". If they ignore quality and by magic hit the date but they spend months fixing bugs then they fail and they take the blame for the lousy quality. After all, the manager can't possibly be to blame for unprofessional conduct. Perhaps we can't blame Morris. He's just a survivor in a bad organization. He isn't measured on deployed working code and his senior management are unresponsive to objective data. They always believe that developers can be squeezed to produce more - knowledge work is a soft target, brains are spongy, aren't they?!

Trading off quality for reduced lead time is a false economy. It will bite you. Trading off quality in exchange for fast hacking is setting a development team up for failure. It's classic management misdirection. Magical misdirection isn't up-management, it's employee abuse. If your manager is an accomplished magician then it might be time to sharpen up your resume.