Just wanted to address some of the points raised at the July 2015 meeting with ACBL.
This is my (Nicolas Hammond) personal view of ACBLscore+/Bridgescore+ at this time.
At the moment, it does not look like ACBL are going to do anything with ACBLscore+, at least in the short term.
The main reason that I see is an internal ACBL resource issue – they have no resources to do the work, the resources (programmers) that they have are not bridge players, and there are higher priority projects for these resources to work on. Even if they hire new programmers, it is still a 3 month learning curve to learn the software, then a 3 month learning curve if they are not bridge players. They need a project manager – one who understands tournaments/clubs/software and that is probably the hardest hire of all. I’m sure that there are political reasons as well. But it is apparent (to me) that it is unlikely that ACBL will get anything done with ACBLscore+ any time soon.
Any other type of replacement of ACBLscore, e.g. re-writing in .NET is a multi man-year project. It is unlikely to happen any time soon.
Bridgescore+ (Hammond Software (HS)’s version of ACBLscore+) is a year or more further along than ACBLscore+.
For the past year even though we (HS - it as been more than just me) had been working on Bridgescore+, I had no access to ACBL staff. In other words, if I wanted to ask a question about masterpoint calculations, I had been instructed not to contact anyone at ACBL. I guess I could have asked another ACBL member to pose the question to Horn Lake and get it answered, but that’s not the morally correct thing to do. The internal ACBL politics have changed. I’ve now been told that if I have questions that, within reason, they will get answered. Given this political change, it makes it much easier to ‘complete’ Bridgescore+, or at least get it to the point where it would be used more widely than it currently is.
For the last year with Bridgescore+, we had spent most of the time on new features. The required features to ‘complete’, e.g. completing the masterpoint assignment module, was dependent on ACBL providing the specs. These were never provided during the ACBLscore+ contract so that work was on hold.
With the recent changes at ACBL – new CIO, previous road-block employees no longer at ACBL – it is now a viable possibility of ‘finishing’ ACBLscore+/Bridgescore+. It does not look likely that this will happen with ACBL funding, therefore we are going to undertake this endeavor internally, with possibly some outside help.
What needs to happen next for Bridgescore+ is not demos, but real world use. It is no good me saying that the software works, people need to see it work. A demo is no good, it needs to be real world usage.
It is not enough for Bridgescore+ to be as good as ACBLscore, in order for Bridgescore+ to be adopted, it must be better than ACBLscore.
There are two areas for Bridgescore+ – clubs and tournaments. It looks like clubs may be the easiest politically, even though it is more work to complete.
For tournaments, there are two types of tournaments. The NABCs where ACBL is the sponsor and regionals/sectionals where the Districts/Units are the sponsors.
There is little chance that ACBL would use Bridgescore+ at NABC. I have offered to run Bridgescore+, for free, at selected events at the last 4 NABCs – Las Vegas, Providence, New Orleans, Chicago. The events would have been the regional KOs (Bridgescore+ is so much more efficient at starting a KOs event) and also the National Swiss (using Bridgescore+ reduces the number of TDs needed to run the event by at least 2 TDs). In both cases we use projectors, not the racks. I offered to provide all hardware for free, provide my time for free, and train TDs during the events for free. ACBL has said no every time. “If it was any other company we would probably say yes”. There is a political issue involved, it is very difficult for ACBL on the one hand to say that ACBLscore+ doesn’t work and on the other hand have me run Bridgescore+ at NABCs events.
The other tournaments are regionals/sectionals. They are sponsored by the Districts/Units so ACBL has little say on what tools are used. We can use Bridgescore+ so that the output of every game is an ACBLscore game file. We could, if needed, use ACBLscore to re-score, re-rank, re-masterpoint each event. The advantage to Bridgescore+ is that it is easier to use, faster, networked, supports pre-registration etc. etc.
For clubs, we would use a similar approach. If we use Bridgescore+ to run an event, we can use ACBLscore to verify the masterpoints. If Bridgescore+ generates an ACBLscore game file, then ACBL would not even know what was running the event. A club would use Bridgescore+ rather than ACBLscore because it is quicker, faster, easier to use/understand, has more integration and much better import/export capabilities.
Missing Features
I’m not going to dwell on why these features aren’t done, nor answer any questions on the reasons. The detailed reasons were on the ACBLscore+ Wiki. Revisiting the history won’t help the project. Let’s just say that they aren’t done, need to get done.
Clubs
In order to do a first alpha release to clubs, we need the complete the following at a minimum
The release would be to a limited number of clubs. These clubs would be large clubs, have Internet connection, run several games a week, use ESDs, have computer-knowledgeable directors.
The Bridgescore+ software would run in the cloud. There would be a local program that read the ESD data and sent it to the cloud. This is the easiest version to release and support.
The clubs would run ACBLscore at the same time as Bridgescore+. Why? The goal is to show that Bridgescore+ works, will work in a production environment. ACBLscore would be running as well. At same point, when Bridgescore+ is deemed stable enough, we could, in theory, stop running ACBLscore. This probably would not happen for the first 2-6 months.
We need to support the majority of movements common at clubs – Howell (standard, alternate, Groner), Mitchell, Web. This needs to be in the first release.
We do not need to support all scoring with the first release. e.g. world wide game, simultaneous pairs, NAP do not need to be supported. When these events happen, they can be run using ACBLscore.
We do not need to support monthly financial reports. Though it would be relatively easy to generate the current ACBL monthly club financial reports.
We need the ability to create ACBLscore game files from Bridgescore+ and also a tool to compare the two.
When the ACBLscore+ started, movements were a critical path item. Movements were put on hold for 6 months during the contract (I’ll skip the reasons), meaning that a full release of Bridgescore+ is still 6 months away. We have done some work on movements, but to fully integrate all the movements, test all the scoring, ranking, masterpointing is a minimum of 6 months elapsed time.
We can do a limited amount. Within a year of starting, ACBLscore+ could score, rank, masterpoint a simple Mitchell movement. So we can release something early, but something with the sophistication of ACBLscore, including the EDMOV functionality, will take time.
Background
The ACBLscore+ contract was terminated on March 31, 2014; with an update on May 28, 2014. Subsequent updates have been provided.
Specific videos: