On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[Necroterra]

Throwing in my 2 cents about some of the reasons teams might have poor software.

• Not enough manpower: I think that many teams have only a single programmer. If so, it is not trivial for one person without any support to learn and apply everything that goes into buiilding a good project.
• Not enough support: I also wouldn't be surprised if many teams had no dedicated software mentors. Additionally, even here on CD we don't have much of a focus on software, and the WPILIB documentation, while decent, doesn't teach anything about how to design good software (Git, how to organize code, patterns, etc.)
• Not enough visibility: Almost every other aspect of a team is immediately present in their robot and team - you can see the mechanical design, the team branding, the manufacturing, etc. but aside from the occasional code release on CD, I would bet that many teams' programmers haven't really even looked at anyone else's code.
• Not enough incentive for good software: aside from innovation in controls, there is very little incentive for medium or low performing teams to put a lot of resources into their code. Most teams don't have a robot that performs well enough for things like extendable/flexible code or vision to actually matter. The roboRIO is more than fast enough for pretty much everybody, and with the CANTalons, the vast majority of functionality is achieved by very simple code.
• Team's attitude towards software: I think some teams have a very negative or accusatory attitude towards the software subteam. I've definitely seen some shirts / signatures / quotes / jokes that seem to indicate some (probably not conscious) lack of respect towards programmers. I think our team had some bad experiences with these sorts of things before I joined, but I can't myself comment on it.
• Limited robot access: It is inherently difficult to develop software for a machine that isn't built yet. Design/fabrication teams will always want to improve the robot for all six weeks, meaning the programmers have to fight for time with the robot.
• Time limitation: six weeks is a really short timeframe for software. Implementing a good workflow, doing code reviews / refactors, etc. just doesn't really make sense on such a short timescale. I think many teams don't do these sorts of things during the offseason either, either because they just don't work much on robots outside of the main season or for any of the reasons above.

I just think overall, the structure and culture of FRC isn't honestly that great for learning software unless the students are really motivated. I've definitely gotten a lot out of it, but I also have been doing a lot of research and outside work. In my one year of experience, I ran into many of the above issues.

Also, forbidding the modification of release code (that is, working code at competition) is a great idea. Aside from hotfixes / emergencies / changing something trivial like autonomous values, or controller inputs, messing with code at competition is bad practice.