Pool tests are probably the most important event that happen on a regular basis. How your submarine performs at a pool test is roughly the same as how it will perform at competition. It is well understood that the number of pool test hours correlates to competition performance. It takes roughly 200 hours of in pool time to get into the finals. And roughly 500 hours to win the competition. Of course it's not enough to just put the sub in the pool. We need to have useful and relevant tests in order to improve.
There is a lot of preparation that must be done before a pool test in order for it to be effective.
This ensures that we will have enough time to fix any hiccups or cancel the test if need be.
Simple timeline of “this will be tested at this time and for this long” for all the things we need to test. This ensures we don't burn a pool test wondering at one thing that went wrong and helps keep things moving.
Pool tests are a chore especially since we usually have to schedule them on weekends. We want to avoid making the same set of people go to all the pool tests for a semester. Try to have a rotation so people don't get burned out. Note that it's ok to have the same person testing for a month or so. Often our projects will end up in pool testing for a long time. It's expected that if your one person project is in testing you go to the pool test. That being said it's always better to have 2 or more people on a project.
This makes sure that everything will go smoothly at the test itself. People will know what order they will run in and have a fresh memory of how to boot everything up. This also ensures that the code on the sub is all up to date and people have stuff able to run. Dry test is preferably at least a couple days before the pool test so you have some time to fix things if you run into any.