[Tom Line]

I would disagree with a more wide-spread Beta Test.

The coding team that works for FIRST is fairly small. Even with the current Beta-Testing setup, the FIRST volunteers have a ton of data and questions flowing back toward them: far more than they can handle in many cases. In addition we (the beta testers) tend to stay in touch with them, not just during the beta testing period, but year round.

Opening Beta Testing to all teams would create a flood of complaints and bug reports. Many of which would be false, due to inexperience or incorrect expectations. It would overwhelm the FIRST volunteers quite quickly. Quanity is not quality.

True Beta Testing is quite rigorous. We meet 3-4 times a week for 3-4 hours each meeting. Usually we recode for our last 3-4 robots in the new environment and test. Biweekly webpage updates, community updats, and seminars follow.

By having a limited number of teams who have programming expertise learn the software early, you've easily tripled the number of people who can provide knowledgable, correct answers to questions.

I believe the frustration level on the team side would be much higher if they received software that didn't work as they expected it to. People tend to be negative when things don't work. Multiply that by a couple thousand.

HOWEVER. I'd wager that FIRST and their volunteers don't work on this stuff through kickoff and New-Years. I like the idea of the base development environments like LabView being sent out pre-holiday so that we can install the main portions of them before kickoff. Then they could release the updates like they normally do for us to download.