Parkinson's law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

I wish more software engineers would remember Parkinson’s Law.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

In practice:

Parkinson’s Law shows up as:

• Features that could be built in a week somehow take the full sprint when given two weeks
• Projects scoped for a quarter that mysteriously require the entire quarter
• Technical debt that grows to consume whatever “cleanup time” is allocated
• Meetings that expand to fill the scheduled duration regardless of agenda

Getting into why this happens might be a book unto itself, but at a high level, setting time expectations for how long something 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 take tends to make it how long it 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 take.

Engineering teams should therefore prefer shorter, more frequent cycles over longer planning horizons to prevent this natural creep in expectations.

For more details, read:

C. Northcote Parkinson, “Parkinson’s Law,” The Economist, November 19, 1955; collected in Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, John Murray, 1958.