[wireties]

Not all teams have poor software practices. But it is rarely "professional" looking. While helping other teams at competitions I find software all over the place. 1296 splits the application up into tasks/threads for each subsystem and uses messages to synchronize everything. This way the students are all working on smaller self-contained behaviors. We also emphasize good coding standards (including testablilty, reduced complexity, Hungarian notation, etc), draw it then code it, test and retest etc.

Somewhere in this thread it was asserted FRC robots are not all that complex because they "do not process much data". That is kind of a IT way of looking at it rather an engineer's approach. The complexity in FRC robot software centers around temporal constraints, control algorithms and quality assurance. Handling the data to and from the driver station and dashboard is the simple part.

Several persons in this thread have remarked about the value of tested code. Code that works is crazy valuable but can be even more so if good practices are followed from day zero. Software has a "life cycle". That life cycle ends if the code is unreadable or not maintainable even if it works. So the holy grail is to follow good practices to begin with, test the heck out of it and always keep a copy of the code that worked! It can be done, even in a 6-week time frame.

HTH