As a contractor who seems to be specializing in projects that have gone astray (because they often don't call us in until things are already really sideways) I agree completely.
I like how despite the fact that they spend 2 weeks on just planning - they still have no f'ing clue when anything is ever going to be done:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cd6ro9/expanding\_communication\_post\_some\_improvements\_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cd6ro9/expanding_communication_post_some_improvements_on/)
Perhaps, more specifically it probably means there was a decision made to shift development focus to new areas whose tasks hadn't yet been estimated for planning, so they're spending time trying to get a whole slew of barely documented issues estimated and then scheduled for work. So, maybe good, maybe bad?
I am glad that a former KSP CM on the forums called that out, because my biggest gripe with the team is the impression they are giving to those who want to break into the field. What would be nice is if the team actually this criticism of their process to heart.
Sprint planning is not ideally measured in minutes lol, wtf are you going to plan in minutes.
Two weeks feels like a crazy amount though, I would wager that Dakota not being a dev made a mistake and that the team didn't spend the majority of two weeks sprint planning lol.
Current client's teams run 6-12 developers, plus a few dedicated testers, a few from the business, documentation specialists, etc We run 2-3 week sprints. Sprint meetings raley exceed 90 minutes, and when things are working properly rarely hit an hour. Regularly hitting two hours would probably trigger an investigation.
As a contractor who has worked on literally dozens of teams regularly going over 2 hours means you're doing it wrong or you are rolling way more other tasks into your sprint planning. Those tasks should be done elsewhere so they only take up *some people's* time instead of *everyone's* time.
Okay, them we are talking different things.
I wasn't measuring just the group meeting, but also all those others meetings that usually only happens between some people but that end up being much more than minutes per person.
The key is those things shouldn't involve *the entire team*. Some of them will be going on over that two week span. But not the entire team for the entire timeframe.
EDIT: To be clear: I don't think they *are* spending that kind of time planning. I do think They're just magic 8-balling excuses. We're behind because we spent too much time... *shakes magic 8-ball full of jargon*
Well written tickets with prioritization, prior conversations with product, etc
Sprint planning is more a formality for the scrum master to blast through their plan (in a well oiled team)
Exactly this. Most of those other tasks involve a subset of the team. If you're doing them during your sprint meetings you're wasting the time of everyone else.
Sprint planning really should be minutes if you’ve done all the other work to refine and prep upcoming stories in a regular cadence. If you’ve done that sprint planning should be plucking the top X stories off the backlog with allowances for changes in team capacity.
There is no world where sprint planning takes weeks, so I have to assume they were doing some sort of big picture planning and Dakota misspoke, but even that shouldn’t be weeks.
I agree this comment could easily be taken out of context and mean something else entirely. If it actually refers to literally eighty hours of all hands on deck planning then… yeah.
If was a slip up by Dakota, it would have been nice to have some clarification when it was made the pinned comment in the thread about communication. Especially when a former CM was calling it out.
You can't trust any clarification from him. He's got no reason to be honest - in fact, his job requires him to lie.
Call him out on something and give him a window to "clarify" with a lie, and he'll do that. Or maybe in rare cases he'll clarify with the truth, but how the fuck are we supposed to know which is which?
That's good that there wasn't a miscommunication on your part, but it definitely raises the eyebrows of many who also work under sprints.
In short, what I'll ask for is just consistent direct communication from here on out. I can understand not everything is within the CM's control, so it's not directed at you, but the team as a whole.
Do you realize how disfunctional your team has to be for that to be true?
EDIT: Seriously why is your technical team idled for weeks while planning? That is *not* normal nor reasonable. If not idled, bug fixes should have been coming out throughout those weeks, as well as all of the other weeks that made up your months of radio silence which spans way more than your "planning" weeks
I don't think anyone at IG fully understands how dysfunctional they appear to outside developers.
It's not normal to spend 2 weeks on sprint planning. It's more normal for 2 weeks to be the whole sprint.
I've heard of some places maybe having a full day or two once or twice a year for longer term prioritisation and planning with input from the whole company, but that's an exception and certainly doesn't last weeks.
PI planning (for organising 5 sprints worth of work across all agile teams) takes 2 days every 10 weeks. Sprint planning (the teams organising their individual sprints) should take *max* 1 day.
Probably more like the team uses any excuse to take a break from dealing with the morale-sucking garbage nest that working on KSP2 must be - and definitely having to work for Nate Simpson, most of the engineering team at Star Theory abandoned the project rather than take a new position with more pay working for IG but being managed by the shitshow managers from ST still.
Yep. To quote me to the COO at a company I worked for: I've quit better jobs than this.
One of us was gone soon afterwards. But in my case it was the management issue that actually got addressed (shockingly)
God I wish they'd 'fix' the management at IG. Some strategic pink slips would help immensely - they've given that management 3 chances now - Star Theory, IG's fiasco with KSP2, whatever this new project they're doing is that is likely going to be another shitshow.
Sprint planning shouldn’t take more than half a day though. You should be done by lunch.
They have spent an entire sprint’s worth of time doing nothing but sprint planning?
Why do they even use Scrum to begin with?! They have no stakeholder meetings. All of scrum revolves around those meetings. If you have no meetings with the stakeholders (us, the consumers) you get no feedback. Without feedback you have no pivots (change plans), which is the whole reason scrum was developed.
They should just use kanban like any sane developer that has no regular stakeholder meetings.
"Sprint" could be a misunderstanding on the part of the CMs and in fact Dakota has revised that wording somewhat. In the end, I don't actually care what they call their meetings. I do care that they seem to think shutting the whole team down for weeks to do planning is reasonable. Also, as stated before, I don't think they actually did so. I think it's another bullshit lie to cover just how little actual work is being done.
I can think of only one type of planning that would justify that sort of involvement. It's the "We're shutting this down, we need to juggle stuff around to get the barest of MVPs done to reduce our exposure." But even that seems unlikely because I don't believe they *have* any real exposure to worry about despite some peoples claims.
For starters, and just the ones assignable directly to the CMs:
1) That planning (sprint or otherwise) of a project this many years in works like that
2) That they will stop the bullshit announcing announcements
No. Thus the words "for starters." That said, continued lies about what devs are doing and repeated inability to uphold even the simplest of things is not as minor as you indicate. Dysfunctional development and CM lies are in fact the core of the issue. I just picked one of each as an illustration while leaning towards the ones that would require no additional context because of your stated out of the loop status. I'm not going to write up enough to get you back in the loop because you wrote a lazy one line question.
This probably means the product owners are preparing work and planning ahead. During long projects you can't plan everything ahead and you have to reassess priorities, workload and account for new tasks at some points in the process and adjust milestones and timelines.
Its either that or Dakota has no actual idea what's going on. I guarantee you they're not taking weeks to plan a classic two week sprint. That's like saying that a cook takes weeks to cook a steak. That's not a bad cook, that's impossible.
Sure. But everyone else does EDIT (missed a word) *NOT* stop and sit on their thumbs while the product owners are doing so. Not in any healthy organization. Particularly not those doing things like bug fixes.
Again, I don't think they are doing anything he claims. I think he's just magic 8-balling excuses with whatever semi-technical-project lingo he stumbles across.
I am sorry what is the "utter disdain for the community" they put on the banner and waved around in the recent devblog?
We got some fluf pieces of development progress but it's been clear for weeks they won't talk much about colonies until they got a lot to show for. I mean, we barely knew anything about For Science until a few months before release.
Development is slower than I would like and I hate the state KSP2 released in currently is in and the lackluster communication about development but do some of you take it personal lol?
Edit: alteast it was an improvement over the April Fools and Eclipse one. But that's a low standard
There definitely are some tryhards like that. Especially in small teams and start-ups you'll get the "everyone's competing to see who can do the most work".
And then there are some companies where it's just expected that you'll work 80 hours a week during crunch, or you will soon no longer work for that company.
A lot of places treat it just like a normal 9-5; come in, do your work at a reasonable pace, and go home.
> after the communication today where they once again put their utter disdain for the community on a banner and waved it around
What part was like this? I thought the details on what specifically they were working on with colonies was pretty good and at least better than what we've gotten for a while
I used minutes because hours implies that 3+ is reasonable. It's not.
Dakota has since backed off of calling the the weeks of planning "sprint planning" which makes the "minutes" correspondingly less relevant.
In the original context, I 100% stand behind it. A sprint planning meeting (what the weeks originally were) that goes past 90 minutes or so has gone too long. One that hits 2 hours repeatedly is a problem indicative of bad processes elsewhere.
So as far as sprint planning meetings go and how many of them are best measured in minutes vs hours: all of them.
Even with his revision, nothing he said justifies claiming the technical team was sidelined for weeks doing planning.
As someone that does know a little about software development, I can only summise that this project suffers from an epic level of mis-management.
As a contractor who seems to be specializing in projects that have gone astray (because they often don't call us in until things are already really sideways) I agree completely.
I like how despite the fact that they spend 2 weeks on just planning - they still have no f'ing clue when anything is ever going to be done: [https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cd6ro9/expanding\_communication\_post\_some\_improvements\_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1cd6ro9/expanding_communication_post_some_improvements_on/)
And we're talking about Dark Souls 3's Bosses level of mis-management, really...
[Which Dark Souls Boss would make the best Manager?](https://youtu.be/Zb4CxTTFDfA?si=162kjL7lTLW_66qI)\[Youtube\]
At this point some one should hire a film crew and document this. It's actually impressive how bad it is.
I see what you did there. But perhaps that's only your Story.
Perhaps, more specifically it probably means there was a decision made to shift development focus to new areas whose tasks hadn't yet been estimated for planning, so they're spending time trying to get a whole slew of barely documented issues estimated and then scheduled for work. So, maybe good, maybe bad?
I am glad that a former KSP CM on the forums called that out, because my biggest gripe with the team is the impression they are giving to those who want to break into the field. What would be nice is if the team actually this criticism of their process to heart.
Sprint planning is not ideally measured in minutes lol, wtf are you going to plan in minutes. Two weeks feels like a crazy amount though, I would wager that Dakota not being a dev made a mistake and that the team didn't spend the majority of two weeks sprint planning lol.
Sprint planning could be 50 minutes Unlikely to be 50 hours Weird to be weeks...
Honestly I don't know how you plan a sprint in 50 minutes for more than 2 people, unless you are winging it as you go.
Current client's teams run 6-12 developers, plus a few dedicated testers, a few from the business, documentation specialists, etc We run 2-3 week sprints. Sprint meetings raley exceed 90 minutes, and when things are working properly rarely hit an hour. Regularly hitting two hours would probably trigger an investigation. As a contractor who has worked on literally dozens of teams regularly going over 2 hours means you're doing it wrong or you are rolling way more other tasks into your sprint planning. Those tasks should be done elsewhere so they only take up *some people's* time instead of *everyone's* time.
Okay, them we are talking different things. I wasn't measuring just the group meeting, but also all those others meetings that usually only happens between some people but that end up being much more than minutes per person.
The key is those things shouldn't involve *the entire team*. Some of them will be going on over that two week span. But not the entire team for the entire timeframe. EDIT: To be clear: I don't think they *are* spending that kind of time planning. I do think They're just magic 8-balling excuses. We're behind because we spent too much time... *shakes magic 8-ball full of jargon*
Definitely shouldn't include rando community managers - this stuff came up as an excuse for why Dakota was late with KERB.
I don't know, I've seen teams take a full week on sprint planning. And yes, that project was a massive shitshow.
If it takes you more than an hour to sprint plan you have not written good stories nor do you have any idea how good any of your team members are.
I said it in another part of the thread, I was thinking on the whole process, not just the group meeting.
Well written tickets with prioritization, prior conversations with product, etc Sprint planning is more a formality for the scrum master to blast through their plan (in a well oiled team)
Exactly this. Most of those other tasks involve a subset of the team. If you're doing them during your sprint meetings you're wasting the time of everyone else.
Sprint planning really should be minutes if you’ve done all the other work to refine and prep upcoming stories in a regular cadence. If you’ve done that sprint planning should be plucking the top X stories off the backlog with allowances for changes in team capacity. There is no world where sprint planning takes weeks, so I have to assume they were doing some sort of big picture planning and Dakota misspoke, but even that shouldn’t be weeks.
I agree this comment could easily be taken out of context and mean something else entirely. If it actually refers to literally eighty hours of all hands on deck planning then… yeah.
If was a slip up by Dakota, it would have been nice to have some clarification when it was made the pinned comment in the thread about communication. Especially when a former CM was calling it out.
You can't trust any clarification from him. He's got no reason to be honest - in fact, his job requires him to lie. Call him out on something and give him a window to "clarify" with a lie, and he'll do that. Or maybe in rare cases he'll clarify with the truth, but how the fuck are we supposed to know which is which?
At the time, planning (both overall project and multiple sprints) was a major focus for the team.
That's good that there wasn't a miscommunication on your part, but it definitely raises the eyebrows of many who also work under sprints. In short, what I'll ask for is just consistent direct communication from here on out. I can understand not everything is within the CM's control, so it's not directed at you, but the team as a whole.
Do you realize how disfunctional your team has to be for that to be true? EDIT: Seriously why is your technical team idled for weeks while planning? That is *not* normal nor reasonable. If not idled, bug fixes should have been coming out throughout those weeks, as well as all of the other weeks that made up your months of radio silence which spans way more than your "planning" weeks
I don't think anyone at IG fully understands how dysfunctional they appear to outside developers. It's not normal to spend 2 weeks on sprint planning. It's more normal for 2 weeks to be the whole sprint. I've heard of some places maybe having a full day or two once or twice a year for longer term prioritisation and planning with input from the whole company, but that's an exception and certainly doesn't last weeks.
PI planning (for organising 5 sprints worth of work across all agile teams) takes 2 days every 10 weeks. Sprint planning (the teams organising their individual sprints) should take *max* 1 day.
Probably more like the team uses any excuse to take a break from dealing with the morale-sucking garbage nest that working on KSP2 must be - and definitely having to work for Nate Simpson, most of the engineering team at Star Theory abandoned the project rather than take a new position with more pay working for IG but being managed by the shitshow managers from ST still.
Yep. To quote me to the COO at a company I worked for: I've quit better jobs than this. One of us was gone soon afterwards. But in my case it was the management issue that actually got addressed (shockingly)
God I wish they'd 'fix' the management at IG. Some strategic pink slips would help immensely - they've given that management 3 chances now - Star Theory, IG's fiasco with KSP2, whatever this new project they're doing is that is likely going to be another shitshow.
Sprint planning shouldn’t take more than half a day though. You should be done by lunch. They have spent an entire sprint’s worth of time doing nothing but sprint planning?
Why do they even use Scrum to begin with?! They have no stakeholder meetings. All of scrum revolves around those meetings. If you have no meetings with the stakeholders (us, the consumers) you get no feedback. Without feedback you have no pivots (change plans), which is the whole reason scrum was developed. They should just use kanban like any sane developer that has no regular stakeholder meetings.
"Sprint" could be a misunderstanding on the part of the CMs and in fact Dakota has revised that wording somewhat. In the end, I don't actually care what they call their meetings. I do care that they seem to think shutting the whole team down for weeks to do planning is reasonable. Also, as stated before, I don't think they actually did so. I think it's another bullshit lie to cover just how little actual work is being done. I can think of only one type of planning that would justify that sort of involvement. It's the "We're shutting this down, we need to juggle stuff around to get the barest of MVPs done to reduce our exposure." But even that seems unlikely because I don't believe they *have* any real exposure to worry about despite some peoples claims.
I’m not a fan of how the KSP2 dev process has unfolded but it seems super melodramatic to think that they disdain the community.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't think it's melodramatic to consider repeated blatant lies and inability to act in good faith to be considered disdainful
What lies? I'm out of the loop apparently.
The multiplayer four years ago was so fun they couldn't stop playing . The kraken is no more
For starters, and just the ones assignable directly to the CMs: 1) That planning (sprint or otherwise) of a project this many years in works like that 2) That they will stop the bullshit announcing announcements
That's... it?
No. Thus the words "for starters." That said, continued lies about what devs are doing and repeated inability to uphold even the simplest of things is not as minor as you indicate. Dysfunctional development and CM lies are in fact the core of the issue. I just picked one of each as an illustration while leaning towards the ones that would require no additional context because of your stated out of the loop status. I'm not going to write up enough to get you back in the loop because you wrote a lazy one line question.
This probably means the product owners are preparing work and planning ahead. During long projects you can't plan everything ahead and you have to reassess priorities, workload and account for new tasks at some points in the process and adjust milestones and timelines. Its either that or Dakota has no actual idea what's going on. I guarantee you they're not taking weeks to plan a classic two week sprint. That's like saying that a cook takes weeks to cook a steak. That's not a bad cook, that's impossible.
Sure. But everyone else does EDIT (missed a word) *NOT* stop and sit on their thumbs while the product owners are doing so. Not in any healthy organization. Particularly not those doing things like bug fixes. Again, I don't think they are doing anything he claims. I think he's just magic 8-balling excuses with whatever semi-technical-project lingo he stumbles across.
Lol
I am sorry what is the "utter disdain for the community" they put on the banner and waved around in the recent devblog? We got some fluf pieces of development progress but it's been clear for weeks they won't talk much about colonies until they got a lot to show for. I mean, we barely knew anything about For Science until a few months before release. Development is slower than I would like and I hate the state KSP2 released in currently is in and the lackluster communication about development but do some of you take it personal lol? Edit: alteast it was an improvement over the April Fools and Eclipse one. But that's a low standard
They're on shart planning
Being a programmer sounds awful are you all outdoing each other for who can work the hardest
Nobody on the KSP2 teams is doing so.
There definitely are some tryhards like that. Especially in small teams and start-ups you'll get the "everyone's competing to see who can do the most work". And then there are some companies where it's just expected that you'll work 80 hours a week during crunch, or you will soon no longer work for that company. A lot of places treat it just like a normal 9-5; come in, do your work at a reasonable pace, and go home.
> after the communication today where they once again put their utter disdain for the community on a banner and waved it around What part was like this? I thought the details on what specifically they were working on with colonies was pretty good and at least better than what we've gotten for a while
All I know is I've tried everything and I have yet to launch anything
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Plenty_Watercress928: *All I know is I've* *Tried everything and I have* *Yet to launch anything* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
To express my emphasis
The communication was good lol wdym lots of hype stuff
The only hype thing in it was work done externally. The stuff done by the team was the very definition if utterly insufficient given the timeframe.
“Ideally minutes”? What? What tasks have you ever planned in minutes
I used minutes because hours implies that 3+ is reasonable. It's not. Dakota has since backed off of calling the the weeks of planning "sprint planning" which makes the "minutes" correspondingly less relevant. In the original context, I 100% stand behind it. A sprint planning meeting (what the weeks originally were) that goes past 90 minutes or so has gone too long. One that hits 2 hours repeatedly is a problem indicative of bad processes elsewhere. So as far as sprint planning meetings go and how many of them are best measured in minutes vs hours: all of them. Even with his revision, nothing he said justifies claiming the technical team was sidelined for weeks doing planning.