This feels like the equivalent to the busywork example in the article. Instead of sweeping the already clean floors just to appear busy, we're scurrying to show frequent progress towards the impetuous goals set from the previous demo, for the sake of showing visible, arbitrary progress.

It would be like an architect and builder assembling a shoddy movie set facade of a house without a proper foundation or framing, just to please a client who expects to see visible, street-facing progress on a steady and consistent basis.

Perhaps it falls to engineering to educate management on setting proper expectations, and creating a proper timeline with milestones.

But much like an employee at Tim Horton's isn't often in a position to tell the boss that time spent physically recovering will be far more useful than cleaning an already clean floor, we're often put in a position of enabling improper client and management expectations, with an implied "or else".