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TL;DR We will not hold a Community Ask Sprint this quarter, but instead, will try using a two week sprint in March 2025.

In the previous two quarters, we have held Community Asks Sprints where all developers/teams focused on community products spent a week working on community asks. You can learn about the previous sprints here and here. This quarter, we will not have a one-week Community Asks Sprint at the end of December. Instead, we will be holding a two-week sprint from March 17, 2025 to March 28, 2025.

Why are we updating the Community Asks Sprints dates?

Due to the holidays and planned company downtime, this quarter has the fewest working days of the year. We didn’t want to begin a Community Asks Sprint now, as we have fewer staff to work on the requests due to staff taking time off, and ultimately, this would result in us getting far less done.

We have found the Community Asks Sprints to be productive and beneficial, but limiting them to a single week with less staff means that we are unlikely to tackle many requests. We believe that holding a two-week sprint a bit later will be a better option, rather than having a week-long sprint with less staff. This will allow us to tackle some of the larger issues in our backlog and ultimately get more things done since the prep time allows us more time to review all of the possible issues for us to address. We are running this as an experiment to see what the impact of a two-week sprint is. Afterward, we’ll measure how successful it was (looking at both velocity - “how many issues did we get through” - and complexity - “were we able to deal with bigger/more complex issues”?) and evaluate the cadence and length of Community Ask Sprints. We are committed to running a minimum of four weeks per year of dedicated Community Asks time, but we’re open to testing the length and frequency of these sprints.

We’ll be sharing more about the March 2025 Community Asks Sprint as we get closer to it and will keep you posted on the timing of future sprints.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know. We will be keeping an eye on this post until December 19th, 2024

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  • 7
    Understandable (so +1) but also some kind of precedent for potentially giving up. Will you be able to really free up all staff for two whole weeks when there will be many other things to do (there always is)? Time will tell.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Dec 6 at 7:37
  • 3
    @NoDataDumpNoContribution I don't see freeing up the staff as an obstacle here as the community asks sprint is pretty important around the organization. Now we may find after this sprint that dedicating two consecutive weeks isn't sustainable, but we will see how it plays out when we get there.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Dec 6 at 19:01
  • 8
    Can you please not say just "upcoming X" in the title? In the question list it’s impossible to say whether this is actually an upcoming event or just something bumped by edits. For example, "upcoming X (March 2025)" would be much better.
    – MisterMiyagi
    Commented Dec 7 at 5:32
  • 3
    @SpencerG Wasn't already now freeing up staff at the right time an obstacle? That's why I would not be surprised if that is also the case next time but it may also only be a one time exception.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Dec 7 at 22:17
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    Maybe I'm missing something here but why can't community input from the various metas be taken continuously throughout the year? Instead of taking some rushed decision based on input from a few, potentially misguided users during a short time window?
    – Lundin
    Commented Dec 9 at 10:37
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution not exactly. We have staff around, but it is reduced this time of year due to the holidays, so we could have run it; it just would have resulted in getting less done. The major contributor to this change is the above and the fact that internally, we asked for a two-week one to see if we could tackle some of these larger requests that are not doable in a one-week time frame.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Dec 9 at 18:21
  • 5
    @Lundin We incorporate various meta request into this process. There is a dedicated group working through the entire quarter to prep for the sprint week. They review the existing asks, assess what can be done, and divide them among the teams. We started taking requests last time to incorporate more current community interests so that what was being prioritized was not solely from our perspective. We still are making the decision, but we wanted it to be a mix of things that the community is currently interested in and items we think need addressing.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Dec 9 at 18:26
  • 2
    @SpencerG Still sounds to me like "loudest on meta that week" wins.
    – Lundin
    Commented Dec 10 at 7:34
  • 3
    @Lundin: It's not that the company only listens to Meta requests made during that time. It's just a period of time dedicated to working on community requests/issues, to my understanding. Those feature requests/bug reports can have been made at any time.
    – V2Blast
    Commented 2 days ago
  • 1
    These days I feel like no matter what the staff announcement is, it's going to be downvoted and criticized. Staff: "I'm going to have a pastrami sandwich for lunch." Meta SE: "You didn't factor in enough input from the community! This sets a precedent for anti-vegan policies! You didn't even mention the farming methods used to grow the lettuce!"
    – Mentalist
    Commented yesterday
  • 4
    @Mentalist no, community sprints just suck. And removing them after mere two sucks even more. Because these sprints, while bad, are apparently the only time the company bestows us with the high and mighty quick fix for a 7+ year old problem. The announcement also sucks. I don't see it fair to shift the blame onto the community for the company failing over and over and over and over and over again. And then posting more drivel and OH LOOK, IT WAS DOWNVOTED. I'm not sure how you rationalise the community to blame for this. The answer box is below if you wish to explain.
    – VLAZ
    Commented yesterday
  • 3
    @Mentalist - The move to cloud announcement shows that staff posts can be well received when they warrant it
    – Sayse
    Commented 23 hours ago
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution The last title was not a reflection of the posts content. Stack Exchange operates on a fiscal year that goes from April 1st to March 31st. January 1st through March 31st, 2025 is Q4 of its current fiscal year. So, the Q4 Community Asks sprint was not moved to March 2025. Instead, we are informing the community of an update to the upcoming Q4 community asks sprint.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented 19 hours ago
  • 3
    @SpencerG that's unnecessarily convoluted, do you really think the community here will communicate with you on the basis of fiscal years? The post body itself says "March 2025" why don't you go and edit that to follow the fiscal year as well? March 2025 means the month of March of year 2025 to anyone who'll read this. We have a bunch of "Planned maintenance" posts as well on this site that mention dates, next thing you'll say is that many of those dates are wrong since they don't follow the fiscal year...
    – Abdul Aziz Barkat
    Commented 17 hours ago
  • 2
    @AbdulAzizBarkat That still only makes sense if one thinks in SE-Inc-years, not normal-person-years. Your suggested title would, in normal-person-time, imply that a past sprint is merged into one just about to happen.
    – MisterMiyagi
    Commented 16 hours ago

2 Answers 2

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47

I'm glad to see there will be a two week sprint to follow up on the missed one-week sprint rather than just missing it, but I don't like that you're pushing it out to til the end of the next quarter; it should be prioritized for the beginning of the next quarter since you're completely missing it (voluntarily) this quarter. That means you're going half a year without working on your core product. I remember a time when the core product was essentially the only thing the developers worked on, year-round.

Telling us this in the 11th hour is better than silence, but it makes it seem like y'all just forgot or made the announcement when someone complained (it's not like one can say Christmas and New Year's took you by surprise, since they happen at the same time every year).

There's also the underlying point of--you can always just run the sprint anyway and make people aware that because it's a holiday time, less work might be done. Or better yet, ask the community which they would prefer between a holiday sprint vs. a delayed but longer sprint to make up for it... that seems like a win-win: the community feels heard, and you either get what you planned (a two week sprint later) or you get away with doing less work than you normally would have to spend (due to holidays and downtime).

Full disclosure: because of the timing of the follow-up sprint and the 11th hour timing of this announcement, I gave this announcement a downvote.

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  • 11
    Pretty much what I was about to say in comment - bottom line, it's not "updating the Community Asks Sprints dates" it's simply aborting one of the Sprints for no good reason.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 5 at 21:11
  • 15
    I can appreciate this appearing like an 11th-hour announcement; practically, it comes close to being one based on the cadence for community asks sprints. But behind the scenes, we were prepared to run a one week sprint and only just got the approval to try a two-week one, though the dates for that were only decided upon last month. Primarily, this change is driven by the groups that ran the first two sprints, who identified that we had some bigger asks we were passing up for lack of time.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Dec 6 at 19:07
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OK, this is unsustainable. The sprints did lead to some good things but also to major regressions like the atrocious inbox experience. Which was already bad after the "new inbox" update in 2022 but is now worse.

It is worse as of the first community asks sprint in July. So MAYBE this will be addressed next March? Yes, a very big "maybe" since that was already ignored last Community Asks sprint.

At this velocity, we are maybe looking at, what, 2026 for the next "fix"? How long to fix whatever that breaks?

It is not just that one issue. I am using it as an example as it is a shining one for how things are handled. 1 step forward, 0.5-1.5 steps back. And the Community Asks sprints barely do more than this.

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  • 25
    Don't forget that the community sprints appear to be used to soften bad news. I do not look forward to whatever else is being rolled out in March
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented Dec 5 at 20:17
  • Could be this
    – MT1
    Commented 17 hours ago

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