Programming Team Size, and do they all do?

[geeknerd99]

In my experience, too many cooks spoil the broth. To me, programming the robot is a very personal experience, and while it's ok to pass ideas around, there should be one, at most two or three actual code writers. If there's more than one, they shouldn't mess with each other's code.

8 sounds like an extraneous number of programmers to me. Then again, our "programming" group is 10 or so this year, but only 3 of us will actually even be touching competition robot code.

And remember. Programmer is a very relative term. There's a difference between mapping a joystick to a PWM and writing a championship-class autonomous mode.

Likewise, theres a big difference between an angry blinking red light...... and a 6000 dollar robot ripping itself in half because you used the wrong argument somewhere. Believe me, I've almost had the second outcome happen to me before.

[Boydean]

Originally Posted by geeknerd99

Programmer is a very relative term. There's a difference between mapping a joystick to a PWM and writing a championship-class autonomous mode.

With what I have read and what not, I plan organizing our rookie year programming team between programmers, the ones who write code for the control system and software engineers the ones who write the autonomous code. But I want to keep this line very thin, for I beleave that the ones who make the control code can as well make autonomous.

[whitetiger0990]

Prior to last year we had one (or two) programmers. Myself not included, they didn't really include me in what was going on =(

No version control system. No documentation. Not exactly clean code (initialized variables which were never used. Huge areas of code that did.. something.. were commented out. Several variables for the same thing. It was crazy).

They graduated, I came into power last year. Still no version control (it crossed my mind too late to set anything up). Documentation was planned but due to lack of time, never happened. Though I do pride myself in relatively clean code (...without comments.) We didn't have much of an autonomous (no time.) We switched the subteam over from "Programming" to "Control Systems." Now we basically take care of the code, the OI, and everything on the bot that runs on less than 12v. The subteam had a few other members but I was the only one that could program the bot.

This year I've set up a Git repository and shoved the previous years' code in there. It's already come in handy when I've needed to check the code while on a computer without anything on it.

It's on my todo list to come up with some form of documentation. (Can someone who has done this contact me?)

We've been having workshops to teach new members programming basics. That's been going well. Hopefully we'll have more than just me that knows how to code the bot by Build Season. =)

See, we kind of have the opposite problem. You have too many people, and we need to teach people to program before I graduate (I'm a Junior, we still have time. =p)