Practicing after Ship - pros & cons

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Gui Cavalcanti

I believe that practicing after ship date is a huge con for students. My main argument is that FIRST is supposed to be a simulation of the real world of engineering; you don't wait to test and refine a product until after it has shipped! If you are designing a product, you must factor in appropriate refinement time during it's development cycle. If you want to field an advanced robot, I believe you have to accept the fact you may not have the time to test all of its systems before competition. FIRST is as much an experience in management as it is in engineering.

As an additional con, what happens to teams that do not have the funds to create a practice robot, yet participate in one of the last regionals? Some teams may have had a month or so of pure practice time with their mock-up robots.

If you are going to argue that unfairness mirrors real-world engineering, remember that deadlines and proper scheduling also reflect real-world engineering.

I definitely agree with the funding con, it does take extra cash to build a second bot, and quite a bit at that. We have been helping a few rookie teams who I know won't have the extra money to do that.

On the flip side, while you say this mirrors real world engineering, I would say only to an extent. While deadlines are real, the timeframe FIRST gives us is rather unrealistic. Doable? Barely. Probably good for our sanity? Definitely. Realistic? Not really.

A huge portion of my time as a systems engineer is spent quoting how much time and money a project will take. I estimate how much real world time an engineer would have to spend to do the job, that creates a labor cost, we add it to the material cost, mark it up, and send it off to the customer. Often the customer will try and shorten the period for the job, but we have the opportunity to quote it first. However, we also build in time for the "unknowns" and pad even that so that we have enough time to make our deadlines. FIRST doesnt give us the opportunity to quote how much time we want.

Additionally, in the real world, you can often be a day or two late. A company has to weight the penalties against the benefits (ie are we going to ship a fully tested product and take a $1000 delivery penalty, or are we going to ship an untested product and cross our fingers?). FIRST has no option.

And 99% of companies DO test their product after they ship... how else would microsoft send out service packs? Why do companies do recalls? Just because it is out the door, does not mean the company is not still trying to improve it.

While I totally agree with FIRST's method of doing things (the 6 week limit and the drop dead date), because otherwise we would all go insane or become fried, I dont know that I can totally agree with FIRST completely mirroring real world engineering.

Sorry, I digressed a bit...

I think everyone has mentioned the pros/cons that I can think of (and more). As a team leader, I think if we can afford to build a practice drivetrain we will, but we will meet at MOST 1 night per week between competitions. Likely I would also invite local less-resourced teams in the area to practice on our bot. While it is not their own drivetrain, at least it can give them a feel for the size of the competition and strategy if they need it.