 <p>This is not really a programming question, but more of the management question.</p> <p>Missed deadlines are rarely developer's fault. As a developer you should try your best to do as good work as you can, but in the end everyone is capable of only so much. If developers put in honest effort and despite this the deadline was missed, it means that the deadline was unrealistic to begin with.</p> <p>Dealing with deadlines is responsibility of managers. There are different approaches but none of them include "penalizing" developers for doing their job. An important thing to understand here is the so-called project management <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_triangle" rel="nofollow noreferrer">triangle</a>. What it means is that software project can be good (i.e. meeting requirements, good quality), fast (meeting deadlines) and cheap (headcounts, tools). The trouble is that only 2 out of these 3 properties can be chosen.</p> <p>So if management want something good and fast - it is not going to be cheap.</p> <p>If management want something good and cheap - it won't be fast.</p> <p>And finally if management want cheap and fast - guess what, it won't be any good.</p> <p>So the correct response to missed deadline depends on the chosen scenario. Good and fast requires adding some extra help, better tools, investment in above-average developers and more. </p> <p>Good and cheap by definition assumes that deadlines are going to be missed (Blizzard, makers of World Of Warcraft are good example of this approach)</p> <p>And finally cheap and fast usually means cutting features and releasing with bugs.</p>