Alpha Play Time
We’ve been playing with Team Solution Software this week, passing messages back and forth among our team members, adding appointments and meetings to our shared calendar, uploading and sharing files, documents and images, time tracking our activities, and generally taking the system out for a test drive. It’s getting excellent mileage, and our testing as been uneventful.
In the development of a web-based management system like Team Solution Software, there’s something of a time disconnect between the interface design and the functionality. The design comes first, and is, therefore, very virtual - - it’s all in the abstract because the screens are purely images with just a little bit of HTML and simple navigation. There’s no functionality behind it. At the Alpha stage in software development, the interfaces come alive as they are joined by the functionality.
Thus, review and testing at the Alpha is both of the functionality (programming) and the interface (design). We’re finding the functionality to be pretty solid so far; the revisions and tweaks we’re making are in the design and the interface. We’ll be at Private Beta before the week is out, and we’ll be reaching out to those who signed up to play with the system pre-Public Beta in a few days.
It’s an exciting time in our office, and we’re having fun.
