On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[faust1706]

McCall quality factors are lacking, or in some cases non-existent. in FRC and it is about time to address it.

Year after year, the vast majority of teams are writing poorly written, inefficient, and disorganized code. Their code base fails to generalize for multiple years due to poor design, but no one seems to care or talk about this.

Someone posts a cad drawing of a robot that they did for practice. People ask questions asking about the foundations of the design ("How thick is the G10?"), but no one asks questions when code is released. No one asks, "what is the *big-O notation of this function?" No one cares enough to truly scrutinize someone else's code. No one cares that an on board vision program isn't threaded. No one cares about how inefficient a routine is so long as it works in a match. A lot of teams forbid the altering of code once it works, which is a disgusting practice. Teams that get 10-15 fps on a vision program and say "it's good enough" when they haven't even done their research on optimization techniques. The vast majority of code would get a 'C' at best in an intro to programming class in a high school. So why is no one talking about this?