PC A word from a QA Tester

Yea, let's all just ignore the facts.....
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That's kind of the impression I got too.


"You may be tempted to shut down my nonsense with facts, data, and common sense... but don't... cuz then I can't continue."

Anyway saulysw,

don't take my post too seriously. Just messin' with ya.

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My point is valid though.

This update was needed. That's the real meat of the issue.

Updating not only the game engine but the internal systems within the game to optimize it had to be done at some point.

Why later? Why not now? Well.... TFP decided now was a good time since A16.4 was such a good build.

I agree. It's one of my favourites.

I don't think this is a matter of "biting off more than they could chew" kinda thing.

More like they knew it was going to be bad and did their best to deal with it.

The only issue I have is the lack of communication since July.

If a project is going over time budget then communication needs to increase.

At least that's what they taught me in University when I was studying for my Masters Degree in Business.

 
I believe they could have chosen to make significantly less changes in this alpha to make the turn around quicker. There are always choices and feature creep is a thing too. Yes, there were some pretty big and needed structural changes made, and these had knock on impacts. I do get that. They could have pushed some of that to the next alpha and got this one out the door something like 3 months ago instead.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone here, and I'm very pro-TFP dev team in general - but I do think the release delay is a bad thing and is largely self inflicted. It is a problem a lot of developers face at some point and only really gets fixed by setting a release schedule as a management priority. Even if they don't hit the release date exactly, as long as it is being discussed and considered it will more or less resolve itself. The whole "it will be done when it is done" mindset has the disadvantage of minimising this concern, and the ball just keeps on rolling longer than it otherwise should. I would not be surprised to hear Madmole come out after this release with some form of tighter schedule for the next alpha, to avoid repeating this problem. Let's see, eh? As it stands now, the QA team have a really hard job as there is so much new stuff to test.

Note : Most of what I am saying is MY OPINION and I am not stating this AS FACT. In terms of splitting alphas down to smaller quicker releases, only the devs themselves could argue this as FACT, and even then I would expect there to be lively debate amongst them. It is kind of irrelevant now anyway, it is what it is for this alpha.

 
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I believe they could have chosen to make significantly less changes in this alpha to make the turn around quicker. There are always choices and feature creep is a thing too. Yes, there were some pretty big and needed structural changes made, and these had knock on impacts. I do get that. They could have pushed some of that to the next alpha and got this one out the door something like 3 months ago instead.
I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone here, and I'm very pro-TFP dev team in general - but I do think the release delay is a bad thing and is largely self inflicted. It is a problem a lot of developers face at some point and only really gets fixed by setting a release schedule as a management priority. Even if they don't hit the release date exactly, as long as it is being discussed and considered it will more or less resolve itself. The whole "it will be done when it is done" mindset has the disadvantage of minimising this concern, and the ball just keeps on rolling longer than it otherwise should. I would not be surprised to hear Madmole come out after this release with some form of tighter schedule for the next alpha, to avoid repeating this problem. Let's see, eh? As it stands now, the QA team have a really hard job as there is so much new stuff to test.
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What is your background?

Do you have a degree in a related field?

- Technology

- Business Admin

- Organizational Behaviour

Etc...

Just curious where statements like "I believe they could have chosen...." are coming from.

 
Its not all black and white but i get where saulysw is coming from.

I got a prince2 project management cert and are currently CIO for a share economy company in Denmark and are currently managing 2 different development teams, one that is working with our machine learning and another that is developing our app.

You do set timelines and i'll bet that the "we are done when we are done"-public approach is so nobody is jumping at the gun when a deadline gets pushed. (remember when Madmole stated he hoped they would have it done by august?). When they give us their little finger, we take the hand. Thats how it is with online communities. You get a vocal minority that demands.

Development takes time, even if you don't have scopecreep. I bet they got internal deadlines or sprints and just chose not to share them with us to avoid a further deadline push. Bugs happen and i bet the transformation to the new Unity engine havent been easy.

If they released a bugridden A17 in august, everyone would have been up in arms with "what have you done for the past year".

Not saying it couldn't have been handled better, but assuming that Madmole and crew is a bunch of software development hippies, they are trying to manage expectations.

Its easier to manage expectations when you know your product might not launch at a specific time.

 
@LuckyStar : Degree in information technology, career as IT Manager for 30 years including direct involvement in a number of software development projects. I've done my fair share of coding. I think I'm allowed to have an opinion regardless, as are you.

 
@LuckyStar : Degree in information technology, career as IT Manager for 30 years including direct involvement in a number of software development projects. I've done my fair share of coding. I think I'm allowed to have an opinion regardless, as are you.
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Well, the Pimps have already said that this Alpha has a HELL of a lot of content in it, and perhaps more than they would normally squeeze into a single Alpha cycle. It's also come on the back of a major engine update, which I note, some other developers of Unity games in my very own library have stumbled over in a major way, including one major, often referenced title around here I see is rolling back the changes completely.

I don't think anyone saulysw, is saying this delay between A16 and A17 is ideal. I'm pretty sure the Pimps wouldn't have wanted it either.

That said, they've delivered sixteen Alpha's already, and if there's an exceptional delay in one Alpha, for good and easily seen reasons, then I think people should be cutting them the slack they deserve and let them be to work at it, and get it out the door as soon as they can.

PS: I'm not trying to say here that you're not already doing that, just adding to the discussion in general and stating my view of the exceptional A17 delay.

 
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