why blame the programmers??
 

im wondering, if anything goes wrong with the robot why blame the programmers??(any suggestions, comments or ideas??)
:confused:

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

You can't see software, people have a tendency to blame the unseeable (e.g. software, attitude/mind, God... ect)


Seriously, I sick of it, 90% of the time, it was hardware problems, but people blame software 90% of the time...

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Because it's their fault.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Team Role: Mechanical

:rolleyes: Typical, most complaining about software was from either mechanical or electrical guys...

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

The trick is to train the rest of the team to blame electrical instead.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Because if hardware broke as easy as code does, no team could afford to build a robot. If we were playing a match and suddenly our robot did something it was not supposed to, I would suspect that either the code or a sensor was not working as it should. Code breaks easy, and if our robot suddenly started malfunctioning, I would load up the most basic code that works beyond a doubt to confirm whether it was us programmers we should have blamed.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

That would work great except, I currently hold head programmer, and electrical. So you can imagine I get all the blame.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

The trick is for each sub-component of a team (programming, electrical, mechanical) to listen to the other people's proposals for what is wrong, and investigate it to the best of their abilities. If the programmers say that a limit switch might have a short while the hardware guys say that the program isn't checking the switch often enough, both teams should double-check both of their components as best they can.

Quite often the programmers can direct the hardware guys to a potential source of a short or disconnected wire, while the hardware guys can tell the programmers if they're operating some system outside of its design limits. If both sub-teams can work together rather than fighting over whose bug it is, then you should have a more successful robot.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Because Mech and Fab can't do anything wrong to make the robot not work =P (I was the welder for my HS team) Plus our programmers did things like buy soldering irons from the dollar store, have to rewire one, and then it blows up while someone is using it. It's always the code =P jkjkjk To be Honest I dont know why people blame programing

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Because most often, it is the programmer's fault.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Typically, a program has many more points of failure than a mechanical or electrical system.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Perhaps my favorite quote from the season: "The programmer's taking responsibility for the problem. It must be mechanical then!"

It's simply a black box problem. Almost anyone on a team can understand how a mechanical system works. Electrical causes much more confusion than mechancial, but it is still understandable to many. Programming is the least understood, so everyone automatically jumps to it. Programmers (on our team at least) understand almost everything on the robot, and can therefore pinpoint exactly where the problem is. Since the programmers usually figure out the problem, guess who is yelled at every time?

Oh, and my favorite error of the season was when mechanical drilled through some wire on the robot and caused everything to fail.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Wow, I hope there is lots of joking in this thread. As someone who has programmed PLCs for machinery I am impressed that these programmers can get so much functionality in so little time. They are the last people who can test there work. They are the only ones that can work after the 6 week build but unless you have the luxury of a test robot they cannot test their code until the competition. The worst part is that their errors can be the most noticible, dead robot, erratic behavior,etc.

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

This can be a touchy topic because programmers can be semi-defensive, but I'd like to believe that mechanical can be a really visual thing, where as programming can be a mental jumble.

And we never "single out" the programming department. If something isn't working, all of the guys dive in and see if its their department. Just so happens that programming has the error. :P

Re: why blame the programmers??
 

Because, with 5 weeks to plan and get ready (and presumably knowing all the ratios between where their encoder is and where the wheel is that it's tracking), they STILL complain when they only get a week to test the robot and implement the minor tweaking that should take 3 days at most.

Oh, and if a mechanical guy makes a minor error, the robot can still work. If a programmer makes a minor error in the wrong place, the robot doesn't work...

(Mechanical guy joking about good reasons not to take the blame)

Oh, and Bongle-- I'm sorry, but the mechanical bugs immediately get squashed by the nearest flyswatter. The programming team is therefore the only team that has bugs...:p But yes, in principle it is best to work together to find the problem and eliminate it.