If you could Breakaway all over again...

[jspatz1]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

Throw the KISS mentality out the window. I believe that mentality has made the team feel competent; feeling competence is not good. We must get better everytime, or we will never be able to compete at a higher level.

I'm afraid this is a misunderstanding of what KISS is about. It does not mean that your goals and capabilities are "simple", it means that the way you achieve them is simple. There is always a simpler and a more complex way to accomplish the same task, KISS simply means that you always strive for the simpler way. It means that your first design idea is probably not the simplest one, and you should keep working to simplify. Complexity leads to break-down, and there is a balance between complexity and performance.

Many FRC world champion robots have been elegantly simple, which is one of the reasons they were able to survive the long road to becoming champion. 2010 was our most successful season ever, and also one of our simplest robots ever. Never sacrifice your goals for what you want your robot to do, but never quit trying to make it do it in a simpler way. That is what competence and competing at a higher level are about.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by jspatz1

I'm afraid this is a complete misunderstanding of what KISS means. It does not mean that your goals and capabilities are "simple", it means that the way you achieve them is simple. There is always a simpler and a more complex way to accomplish the same task, KISS simply means that you always strive for the simpler way. It means that your first design idea is probably not the simplest one, and you should keep working to simplify. Complexity leads to break-down, and there is a balance bewteen complexity and performance.

I taped a relevant quote on the TechnoKats' programming computer when I became the team's software mentor in 2004:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Charles Antony Richard Hoare, recipient of the 1980 Turing Award