[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The other criticism of ending stop build I want to address is deadlines. Some have argued a hard deadline is good practice for the real world, so we need bag day to simulate that. The main problem with this logic is that, it's just completely backwards. Bag day is a soft deadline! You get to keep working on the withholding allowance. Even with no withholding, you get to use a practice robot, and plan for COTS upgrades at competition. A deadline of the actual competition day with a no-bag system would be an Actual Hard Deadline. Similarly, having everyone stop at the same time would also still happen at competitions. Everyone at the competition would have just as much time to work on the robots as everyone else at the competition!

My experience doing software design has mostly been along these soft-deadlines you mention. I worked for a medical device company for a long time. We would have a hard deadline for the *.0 releases, and have to get everything finished for them so we could send them to testing and then to the FDA on time. But once they were sent off to testing, we immediately started working on the *.1 release, fixing everything that was wrong (ie identified in testing) with the *.0 release. And ultimately, the users never saw the *.0 release, we were able to go straight to the field with the *.1 release instead.

You see this all the time with major software releases. Just look at the iPhone - version 9.0 came out Sept 16 last year, followed quickly by 9.0.1 a week later, and 9.0.2 a week after that.

So the way FIRST currently runs does align with some of what we see in the real world. It may not be applicable to every job or industry, but it is still applicable to some.