Qualitiative Scouting

[Skyehawk]

Hello all,
With the release of the 2017 game FIRST SteamWorks and all of the excitement that goes along with it I wanted to bring something to the forefront on the Scouting Forum.

There has been a lot of buzz on this thread about the seemingly impossible task of deducing the fuel scored by a single robot. There are plenty of great ideas over on that thread so I encourage you to give that a read before navigating any further.

The purpose of this thread is to address a sort of 'mental block' that I am seeing with regard to qualitative scouting, many teams seem to want to function purely in the quantitative space. In 2012 team 876 (re)introduced qualitative scouting into the mix, a simple 'yes' or 'no' reaction to a team's performance in a match it has since evolved and become one of the most valuable statistics we track a team on over the course of a match. Not only does it serve as sort of an initial filter when evaluating teams on Friday night, but it serves as a safeguard to easily catch all the little details that are not categorized by more traditional quantitative methods. What I'm trying to get at here is don't be afraid to work with approximations. There are very few statistics over the course of the last several years that a team can have 100% certainty with, this year is no different.

I would rather keep track of 10 data points over the course of a match and have greater certainty in them than gathering data that is more in depth than necessary that may have greater uncertainty. Know what you need to look for in a team and how in depth that data needs to be. Approximation can be an incredibly powerful tool, you just need to know your degree of certainty. Qualitative methods can cut down dramatically on complexity and offer an equally stable basis of comparison for scouting and strategy purposes.