Lessons Learned

Due to the amount of experience that the team had, the project moved along fairly smoothly.

One of the biggest take-aways that was reinforced in our team was that the goal should be to make pivots as early as necessary. Nick defines a pivot as something that requires a major change in the design to accommodate. An example that caused a lot of stress for us this term, was that we planned to do automatic catching up until 4 days before the seeding competition where we had to actually catch balls. When we finally decided that this system wouldn't work, we had to scramble to make a system that would actually catch the balls as we absolutely had to do for the competition. In retrospect, we should have made this decision at least a week earlier, putting in the effort to rule out automatic catching much sooner.

Another thing that we recognize, in retrospect, is that we should always keep the bigger picture in mind. Part of the reason that we left the decision to autonomous catching so late is because we were working on fleshing out and finishing other parts of the system, and while we didn't ignore the catching system, we definitely didn't give it the attention that it deserved. The successful implementation of other systems distracted us from some larger, pressing issues that ended up stressing us out later.