Bookie Beta Phase 1: Recap

From February 1st to 13th, 2018, the Peerplays Blockchain Standards Association (PBSA) oversaw Beta Phase 1 for Bookie, the sports betting exchange built on the Peerplays blockchain. Contributions came from a diverse group of individuals - professional bettors, software developers, affiliate marketers, cryptocurrency & blockchain enthusiasts, and third-party partners of PBSA.

And what a great group! As expected - even exceeding expectations - the beta testers provided solid and detailed feedback.

“We're really impressed with the quality of the feedback during the beta testing. User testing is such an important element of product development and one which we will be returning to in the coming months as the Bookie app progresses,” said Allyson White, QA Lead at PBSA.

Participants in Bookie Beta Phase 1 were provided with the following guideline document:
https://peerplays.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PD/pages/35520732/Extended+Beta+Testing+Information

When testing began, each beta tester was given 1 Bitcoin to bet with and had their choice of American Football (the Super Bowl!), Soccer (EPL), and Basketball (NBA), depending on the day. Over the course of two weeks, testers were encouraged to place as many bets as possible and to experience as much of the app as they could.

Feedback emails started in almost immediately, and right away we knew Beta Phase 1 was going to be a success in terms of information gathered.

Some key issues raised by beta testers from the feedback:

• Settled bets did not immediately show up in My Bets (To specifically monitor event settling, Quality Assurance manually triggered the event resolution mechanism. Resolution delays and the symptoms will not be an issue in the future.)
• Some markets remained open long after the game had settled (This is a symptom of the issue above)
• Small rounding errors with particular combinations of odds and stake
• Installation Issues (We are currently in the process of obtaining Windows and Mac Certification)
• Transaction fees not showing in betslip
• Data presentation improvement in betslip
• Stronger error messaging (We are assessing all of our error messaging to make it as detailed as possible)
• Update Rules section (Currently we have placeholder information but our team is finalizing this element)
• In some instances, the search function within app produced events that already passed
• The color scheme of Bookie could use an upgrade (Duly noted!)
• We also collected a ton of fantastic feature requests to build out our post MVP roadmap

All in all, this was a successful closed beta, with lots of actionable feedback. We’re still on track to have Bookie ready later this Spring, and can’t wait to share the final product with the world!