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Originally Posted by oneangrydwarf
I know that many people would love to develope a scoring system for FIRST, there are many people and teams just itching for the oppertunity, many of the people on here are more then qualified for the challenge, however I must say that most people completely underestimate the process. If it was as easy as everyone thinks, then why has it been such an issue in the past? Why is it that almost every year there are problems with the system? Maybe its because its quit a task to take on. Most people dont realize how complicated the scoring system is. As it controls the field, the scoring, the alliance picking, the seeding, the rankings, everything other then IFI's monitoring stuff and the music and video feeds is controlled by that one system.
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I do believe that a lot of folks underestimate the complexity of the software, but let's not overestimate it either. This stuff is not nearly as complicated as the things that many of the software engineers in FIRST work on during their day jobs. You ask "If it was as easy as everyone thinks, then why has it been such an issue in the past?" Perhaps the answer is because they've chosen the wrong people to do it. This year is a great example - the problems we saw at competition clearly illustrate that there was no formalized test process for the software that was written. Even a basic level of testing would have revealed defects such as half the teams being displayed as Team #0. Test processes that validate team rankings as calculated by the scoring software obviously didn't exist.
Software development groups that have to work on large scale projects that are "business-critical" (meaning failure simply is not tolerated by the customer, certainly applicable in this case) follow a very regimented process to do their development. Contrary to popular belief, software engineers do not just open up a text editor and start hacking code when they begin a project. (For details try reading
this article about the way the software for the space shuttle is developed, which is very similar to what we do at Motorola and I'm sure many other companies.) From what we've seen this year we can conclude one of two things: either the company that developed this software did not have a good development process and just started hacking on it, or they did have a process in place but did not follow it. Either way it is inexcusable, and as such it's not something that just allowing them to get in a year of experience first is going to fix. I believe it would be a mistake for FIRST to reuse this company again next year.
I think the person who commented on this situation a few weeks ago had it right: we are customers of FIRST. Just because we believe strongly in its goals and want badly to see them succeed should not change the fact that we're paying customers. We should expect and demand better than they've given us this year. The fact that there are many qualified software engineers who regularly work on software that is orders of magnitude more complicated and are willing to help FIRST out in this area just makes this situation even more unacceptable.
To any teams out there that are unhappy about the scoring system this year: I encourage you to provide feedback to FIRST at the team forums this summer about this situation. There's no need to rehash all the problems or have a long discussion on it or anything, but make sure they take note of your opinion.