Quote:
Originally Posted by magnets
As previous people have pointed out, FIRST is a massive organization with extremely bright people, and a decent amount of money and sponsors. They are capable of holding an incredible number of competitions and organizing the massive championship event in St. Louis, and other fantastic accomplishments, but they can't seem to test the FMS, the magical closed source networking nightmare of complexity.
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Hold on. FIRST is not a massive organization. It's actually a pretty small operation, in terms of full-time paid employees. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the FMS software is basically written and maintained by one or two people - who also have other things to do. Moreover, they do test the FMS with real robots before week zero. The problem is that the people testing it are the people who wrote it, and the fact that certain things are unintuitive naturally go unnoticed. Then suddenly you run a few thousand matches with dozens of fields and scores of new volunteer users, and you're guaranteed to find problems.
I'm not suggesting that it's ok for FIRST HQ to be sloppy. Last weekend was my first time driving the FMS, and I'll admit, it is not a pretty piece of software. The UX design is somewhere between confusing and awful. It could definitely be better, and I would love to see parts of it open-sourced.
But this outpouring of rage is unnecessary. I'm sure Frank, Matt, and the other folks in Manchester feel terrible about this. They pushed a software fix for this week, and they're doing what they can. Competition season is pretty intense for the FRC staff. Let's work to support them and help them do a better job, not tear them apart.