We’ve been using Sailwave for a number of years to score all of our club races. This week, we ran into a scoring error in which the elapsed time for one of the competitors in Division 5 (we have 5 Divisions, each with separate starts) was incorrect.
When I looked into this, I found that the start time for this competitor was different from all others in the Division.
I dug a little deeper and I found that if a finish time has been entered and the ‘Edit Result’ window is opened (e.g. by double-clicking the result cell), the ‘focus’ is on the Start Time (blue highlight). Since this is a pull-down field with all of the available start times, a simple rolling of the center wheel on a mouse results in this field being very easily changed.
In this case, the scorer (aka ‘me’) inadvertently caused a change to the competitor’s start time when correcting a simple typo in the finish time. Clicking ‘OK’ then accepted the unplanned change to the Start time along with the planned change to the Finish time.
To allow scorers to have a chance of detecting such an error in the future, I’ve changed our published results to include the Start and Finish times in our publishing of the resullts (along with Elapsed, Corrected and BCE). This will allow us to detect the error after it has been made, but hopefully before posting the results.
To minimize the likelihood of the error occuring, I suggest that Sailwave be updated to either set the focus to the Finish time (which is not a scrollable field) or to not have any preset focus at all. I note that similar mistakes could also occur with the Codes field, but they would be visible to the scorer, whereas the ‘start time’ error is not readily visible on the main Sailwave view. To see this error within Sailwave, the scorer would need to change the view to ‘Start Times’, something that I imagine is rarely done.
We’ve been using Sailwave for a number of years to score all of our club races. This week, we ran into a scoring error in which the elapsed time for one of the competitors in Division 5 (we have 5 Divisions, each with separate starts) was incorrect.
When I looked into this, I found that the start time for this competitor was different from all others in the Division.
I dug a little deeper and I found that if a finish time has been entered and the ‘Edit Result’ window is opened (e.g. by double-clicking the result cell), the ‘focus’ is on the Start Time (blue highlight). Since this is a pull-down field with all of the available start times, a simple rolling of the center wheel on a mouse results in this field being very easily changed.
In this case, the scorer (aka ‘me’) inadvertently caused a change to the competitor’s start time when correcting a simple typo in the finish time. Clicking ‘OK’ then accepted the unplanned change to the Start time along with the planned change to the Finish time.
To allow scorers to have a chance of detecting such an error in the future, I’ve changed our published results to include the Start and Finish times in our publishing of the resullts (along with Elapsed, Corrected and BCE). This will allow us to detect the error after it has been made, but hopefully before posting the results.
To minimize the likelihood of the error occuring, I suggest that Sailwave be updated to either set the focus to the Finish time (which is not a scrollable field) or to not have any preset focus at all. I note that similar mistakes could also occur with the Codes field, but they would be visible to the scorer, whereas the ‘start time’ error is not readily visible on the main Sailwave view. To see this error within Sailwave, the scorer would need to change the view to ‘Start Times’, something that I imagine is rarely done.
