The various engineering industries seem to each have their own set of rules of thumb, collected from great minds and scraped from millenia of collective experience. Sometimes tongue-in-cheek, these are all about overcoming unique technical and nontechnical challenges. Occasionally they veer into the specific, but viewed as a whole, they can be seen as a set of philosophies for developing
systems that consistently produce working designs.
Conveniently, building a high-functioning FRC team is
also about developing systems that consistently produce working designs. As such, many of these rules are applicable to FRC.
Kelly Johnson, famed Lockheed systems and aeronautical engineer, developed his
14 Rules of management which he used to run Skunk Works for decades:
- A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided.
- There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
- Push more basic inspection responsibility back to [the people making the parts]. Don't duplicate so much inspection.
In particle accelerator design, there's the Gospel According to
Bill Brobeck. I'll repeat the entire thing here because it's a rare find out in the wild:
- Thy bolt holes shall straddle thy center lines.
- Thou shalt look askance at gunks, glues, and potting compounds.
- When confronted with two solutions, both of which appear impossible, thou shalt choose the least expensive.
- Thou shalt not be misled when thy boss says, "I don't know much about this, but...".
- Thou shalt not use 1/4 inch bolts when one inch bolts will do.
- If thou canst step upon it, thou shalt design it strong enough so that all men may step upon it.
- Thou shalt bear in mind that welding is merely the casting of steel in the worst possible circumstances.
- Thou shalt design assemblies such that parts thereof may be placed in a funnel and come out assembled on the other side.
- Thou shalt stay with it until it works.
- Thou shalt not form ride pools.
In spacecraft design, there's
Akin's Laws, now infamous because they were so widely circulated in the early days of the internet:
- Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
- Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.
- In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.
- Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.
What other lists of rules are out there?