Created by [ Rowan Dempster], last modified on Dec 24, 2019
This page answers the most frequently asked questions about the structure of WATonomous.
TLDR:
Details:
A division is the most general grouping inside of WATO, and defines the different disciplines of the work we do. The 4 divisions are Business, Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. As an example, the Business groups works on business stuff like marketing ourselves to UW students and potential sponsors; whereas Software works on writing code that makes the car drive.
A Group is a grouping inside of a Division where people work on a certain type of tasks within the Division's discipline. For example, within the Software Division, there is a grouping of work that we refer to as “Perception”. The Perception work grouping handles everything that has to do with perceiving the vehicle’s environment using sensors. The people working on that group of work are called the Perception Group.
A Squad is a group focussed on a specific task within a Group. Only Software Groups have squads, because Software Groups are large and need to be split to parallelize the sub-tasks of the Group. For example, if you gave the Perception Group the job of “perceive the car’s environment”, they would naturally split themselves down into different groups working on perceiving different parts of the environment. Some would work on detecting Road Lines, others would work on classifying Traffic Signs, etc… Squads make this breakdown explicit. The people working on detecting Road Lines we say are part of the Road Line Detection Squad.
Please note that groups/squads are always getting added and removed as we identify different working groups that we need or don’t need anymore.
Division: No, depending on the size of the Division and the skill set needed to manage it, there can be multiple Directors. For example, in the Software Division is it common to have two Directors, one technically focused and one managerially focused.
Group: There is only one Group Manager. However, for large groups (e.g. software groups) the responsibility of leadership is split between the Manager and the Group’s Technical Leads. Technical Leads are usually responsible for the different squads inside of the large group, and take some of the managerial burden off of the Manager.
The leadership team includes anyone who is a Team Captain, a Director, Manager, or a Technical Lead.
These tags indicate the most recent term that the member was active for. We want to keep everyone on Discord (because purging the server every term is a lot of work, and we like keeping everyone around :) ), but we also need to know who is active for what term.
Manager: The Director of the Division is responsible for interviewing both and making a decision of who becomes Manager.
Tech Lead: Why don’t they both become tech leads? Groups can and should have a large body (more than one person) of technical leadership.
Document generated by Confluence on Nov 19, 2021 12:21