2010 Control System Getting Started

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

I don't believe that it is right to give a handful of teams an advantage by letting them 'beta' the control system.

I still think you're missing the point of a Beta Test program.

Any team could have used the 2009 FRC software to practice programming and gotten as much or more out of it than the 2010 Beta Testers. They could have focused on using the system and getting useful results. Anything added or changed for the upcoming year won't take away the benefit of that practice.

The teams involved have spent significant effort using tools that were just short of ready, finding and overcoming obstacles, documenting (and often correcting) errors, redoing work when updates occurred, exploring use cases that weren't considered by the developers, troubleshooting problems with the libraries, helping to make the documentation useful, and generally making it possible for the rest of the teams to get a system that works well out of the box.

What these "privileged" teams have done over the past few months is only slightly relevant to what they will have to do after Kickoff. I don't think working with the unfinished software has given them a significant leg up on everyone else, and I know their work is going to give everyone else a better experience than they would have had otherwise.