Requirements- What Data to Collect?

[Mike Soukup]

I'll try to help you out in generalities and tell you what worked for me and what didn't...

When I did WASH in 2001 & 2002 I tried my hardest to keep the fields numerical or time based so the summary sheets could give meaningful information such as average, min, max, etc. I recommend that you do the same. I also found it hard to impose a 1-5 rating for a robot's performance because unfortunately a robot of quality 4 to me is not a robot of quality 4 to someone else. But I did it anyway and tried to train the scouts. I also found that it helps to assign meanings to the 1-5 ratings, such as 1 for traction means the robot could be pushed sideways, and a 5 means there was no slippage. Stuff like that.

I also found that for match scouting you should keep it as simple & concise as possible. I made the mistake of having too many fields and it just confused the scouts. They didn't have enough time and they had to rush to finish filling out the forms.

Finally and most importantly, design your system so you can easily and quickly modify the fields you gather. The game is never played out like we first invision it so the scouting system must be able to adapt. It should take no more than 2-3 days to add or remove a field from the DB, web interface, and input programs because that's all the time you'll have between regionals to work on it. Trust me, I've been there

Keep up the good work everyone.

Mike