FRC Blogged - Frank Answers Fridays: August 30, 2013

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

That will never happen. You really won't know what product they have delivered until it gets in the hands of all the teams and they try to apply it to the game that year.

It might never happen, but not because it is hard. It would require a different design philosophy: Correctness over features.

The mandatory part of the code should be as minimal as possible, and anything that is merely a convenience should be optional. This would cut down on both the size and number of mandatory updates.

Then, updates to the core could be mandatory while updates to any optional part could be applied at a team's leisure, allowing for a proper testing cycle.

[apalrd]

I agree with the correctness over features logic.

Why do we even have updates, with the thread of not being able to connect to the field or stuff like that, after 5 years with this control system? Haven't they ironed out all of the field comm bugs yet?

[Greg McKaskle]

"after five years ..."

Good question. The reality is that some portion of the system changes each season. Bridges are discontinued, manufacturers release firmware updates which they highly recommend using. The Einstein problems meant that many weeks were spent identifying what could have happened, investigating what probably happened, and confirming what did happen. Because of what occurred, radio configurations changed, antennas changed, DS had new responsibilities, logging was enhanced, etc.

And yes, features were added as well. NI had postponed releasing simulation for several years already and we decided to squeeze it in. SmartDashboard/NetworkTables had some issues that needed to be resolved from the previous year, so it was reworked for each language.

I've released SW with large betas and small ones. There are benefits to each approach. I'm not sure how much this really impacts the policy in the original question.

Greg McKaskle