Vancouver 2010 Biathlon Software Rikard Edgren
As a Swede, the winter Olympics are fun to watch. Most sports aren’t spread across the globe, so we have chances for medals.
One of the most exciting events are the Biathlon, and perhaps it was a reaction to disappointing results for the Swedish ladies, but I got really upset at the software:
The numbers for the time are too difficult to read on a non-wide-screen TV. I have a 28 inches box from 2000, and get tired from trying to distinguish 32 from 39.
So an estimate is that more than half of the viewers have trouble seeing what time the athletes have at certain moments.
They also have graphics for shots not fired, hits, misses; and the coloring choice for not shot and misses are too close, and I don’t even have a color-blindness (I think…)
The main graphics from the software is too cluttered, which gets apparent when an athlete is shown in a corner with only parts of the graphics, and everything is much more clear (although the space is smaller.)
And everything is connected, so the software doesn’t only have Usability problems, there are functional issues as well:
When athletes are shooting, their target plate can be displayed multiple times, e.g. at one occasion it was displayed that the Norwegian favorite Björndalen shot at two targets, at one starting from the left, and on the other from the right. When he had finished, it was Teela that had two targets…
On a replay, Helena Jonsson’s time was 0.0.0.0 and matched against a leading time of unknown source.
There has also been missing features, in the latest events they have added an indicator of the wind, and also you can see the time difference between the athlete and the leader (or the second place if it is the best time.) When the inevitable happened, that the time was exactly the same as the leader, the graphics displayed -11.0…
I have no idea how this software has been developed, if they have done any sort of testing, but the addition of features and apparent bugs indicate a rushed project without input from people that will watch the event on “real” TV sets.
But since Björn Ferry won gold, I am not upset anymore; rather this software can be seen as a nice opportunity to practice your ability to see anomalies in real time software.
“There has also been missing features, in the latest events they have added an indicator of the wind, and also you can see the time difference between the athlete and the leader (or the second place if it is the best time.) When the inevitable happened, that the time was exactly the same as the leader, the graphics displayed -11.0…”
I saw that one too, thinking boundary issue…
🙂
There was a session on testing for the Olympics at Eurostar 2008 – I can’t remember the speaker’s name, but he was a manager from Atos, who have the IT contract for the Olympics.
Heh – I just visited Atos’s website, and browsed to see if they had any job openings for testers. Search is currently “Showing results 81 to 80 out of 80”.
Hmm.
Yeah, I saw that presentation, too, Anna.
I actually cannot remember seeing any strange results on Olympic TV transmissions before so I was very surprised when reading Rikard’s post.
Most of the times you can argue that the live environment is different to the test env, but here this is exactly not the case – if the team hasn’t changed the habbits of using the same equipment in test and live.
Atos does the whole logistics for Olymics, so the TV transmissions is only a very, very small part of their undertaking. Maybe the TV viewer experience wasn’t deemed a priority area of the more than 100,000 test hours that was spent.
In the biathlon relay, the athletes have 3 “extra-shots”, and if you saw them on TV yesterday, you could see that it was a color difference, but extremely small.
That the shots of Swedens ACO weren’t displayed until alll shots were fired might not be the software’s fault.
At the start of biathlon ladies mass start the Swedish commentaries lost their computers where they could see all details for intermediate times.
You can also take a look at the upcoming cross-country mass starts. When intermediate times are displayed, there is a “good-looking” delay and scrolling for each athlete’s time. This means that the time to display the names takes longer than the actual time difference, and the result is that you can only see the names for the first athletes (in biathlon mass start there were 13 in a leading group, but the TV users only got to see 9 names.)
There are a lot of software “bugs” around us in our daily life, but in the 2010 biathlon they were more apparent than usual.
My guess of the root cause is that Usablity Requirements are extremely difficult (impossible?) to capture, and the implementation and testing in the biathlon case were driven too much by the requirements.
Atos is not responible for this.
The graphics on TV are made by OBSV (Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver), which are managed by IOC (olymipc committee):
In Norwegian web magazine queries, more than 80% said the graphics were poor.
The digits is a more general problem than biathlon; for cross-country I went very close to the TV to see that Swediah relay team had 8 seconds lead, and a friend did the same to see if the hockey game was 1-0 or 1-1 (adds a bit of excitement!?)