Pushing an application to business in a controlled environment has its challenges but delivering it to the general public takes it to a whole new level. Building on our enterprise experience we knew that we would have some challenges in supporting different platforms. As we rolled the system out, we found that the age and combinations of different devices was 10x greater than in the enterprise. This resulted in us having to invest in testing tools to verify the applications functionality across a very diverse set of devices and implement automated test procedures as part of our application development process.
As the application was going to be used by the general public, we knew that it needed to be very straightforward and easy to use. We incorporated a scoring system with default entries into the system. This enabled the evaluator to start with a max score and decrease the score based on the performance. This significantly reduced the amount of effort to enter an evaluation and subsequently resulted in greater submissions.
One of the things we never thought of was for an evaluator to begin an evaluation at the rink and then complete it when they got home. Our initial feature set missed the boat on this capability and we had to go back and incorporate this functionality in future versions.
The application used the iWuntu rapid application environment as the platform to deliver the evaluations. By default the system provides a 1:1 notification where all data entered in the form was sent to the parties. As an evaluation could be performed for 4 people on one submission it posed a privacy concern if an evaluation was shared with all parties. To address this we had to add a new component that was able to parse out each evaluation from the form and send it to each person individually while sending the complete dataset to the association.
With over one thousand officials to be trained across the province in a short period of time the performance of the Moodle training system became a problem in the first year of the launch. We had numerous instances where the system crashed, didn't accept payment among other issues. Learning from that experience we redesigned the courseware from scratch. By incorporating new techniques we significantly improved system performance and eliminated the design constraints found in year one.
Lexcom Systems Group has been in business since 1996 serving businesses and professionals throughout Canada and the United States. At Lexcom Systems Group we are continuously focused on getting results for our clients. When your business is looking for high quality IT support services, and a team of people to support your business from a technology perspective. That is what we do! Lets build a better future together!
