Sure. It used to be standard-operating-procedure in the old "Waterfall" development days (pre-Agile). Of course, easily half of the fixed delivery projects I worked on for the first 15 years of my career failed, utterly. Still, I worked at one company where year-in and year-out we had to complete the Next Big Release by the Spring trade show. Usually, that meant developers working 80-hour weeks by the end of the deadline and also loud screaming and desk-pounding by management when they, inevitably, had to give up many of their stupidest or most obscure "hard requirements" in order for us to all declare victory to our CEO and stockholders.
In short, technically I've seen "fixed delivery" deadlines met for small projects and met a few times for big ones but the vast majority of times it was shear torture and often required fudging the meaning of "fixed" (features were dropped) and "deadline" (rolling out new features to limited customers over time, etc).
As much as it has become trendy for people to complain about Agile Development, it is 1000% more humane and sensible than Deathmarch development that came before.
Sure. It used to be standard-operating-procedure in the old "Waterfall" development days (pre-Agile). Of course, easily half of the fixed delivery projects I worked on for the first 15 years of my career failed, utterly. Still, I worked at one company where year-in and year-out we had to complete the Next Big Release by the Spring trade show. Usually, that meant developers working 80-hour weeks by the end of the deadline and also loud screaming and desk-pounding by management when they, inevitably, had to give up many of their stupidest or most obscure "hard requirements" in order for us to all declare victory to our CEO and stockholders.
In short, technically I've seen "fixed delivery" deadlines met for small projects and met a few times for big ones but the vast majority of times it was shear torture and often required fudging the meaning of "fixed" (features were dropped) and "deadline" (rolling out new features to limited customers over time, etc).
As much as it has become trendy for people to complain about Agile Development, it is 1000% more humane and sensible than Deathmarch development that came before.