[FRC BLOG] The Great Registration System Crash of 2016

[Foster]

Originally Posted by bkahl

Not too much experience here but that's why I am asking.

Would an upgrade to the website for the registration period really cost $5,400,000+ ($1,800*3000+)? It wouldn't even have to be on the upgraded servers for the entire year. This number seems exuberantly high.

It was a high guess based on needing to do a total rewrite of the existing functionality and databases by one of the big 6 IT consulting firms. From what I remember there are about 30 screens of stuff on the website for TIMs, award submission and event registration stuff. I guessed at the number of function points (Google Function Point Analysis) required and used $1800 per function point (from the last project I worked on that had that kind of transaction rates (mutual fund user facing transaction system that had to do 500 TPS) and got to just under $3.5 million. Add 50% overrun, etc and there you go.

It's an estimate, could it be done for less, sure. Point was it's going to cost money and FIRST teams are not happy what they pay now. Even if it was $300 per team (~$1 million) there would be lots of complaining.

There may be better ways to do it than brute force. (A concept that works for computer systems and also works for robots )

Thanks for the question, hope this helped.