Deep in the bowels of a small-town financial institution, new life was born. Data Models, ORM classes, View Helpers, and a Round Robin split gave birth to something we never could have expected when we started bootstrapping this web product in April 2007.

It began with a simple description of house rules and kiosk etiquette, and the competitors got down to business: registering their teams, signing up for the tournament, and the games began!

The great thing about Tournology is that it hasn’t been difficult to find excellent testers. We provided a location, a few decks of playing cards, and set up a few computers to access the application, and they were more than happy to go to town.

One of the most important pieces of any test is reviewable evidence. We set up two kiosks for our eight teams to use, and also utilized a simple screen capture program to record our end user’s every move. Their stumbles through our foibles would ultimately provide us with the precious evidence we would use to improve our workflows, streamline our interfaces, to reach our end goal: a great application.

After the first few rounds, the tournament began to run itself.  As teams entered scores, they found their next match, identified their competitors, and sat down at an empty table.

After 13 matches, victors were crowned and the competitors dispersed. But our job is just beginning.  We’ve got enough usability reviews, UI tweaks, and new features to keep us elbows deep in code for a while. We’re looking forward to running the next tournament, it’ll stack up to even more greatness!

PS: Want to take a look at the tournament?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Project Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.