We are still in our sprint before User Acceptance Testing next week so we are busily building, testing, fixing, re-testing and iterating features as we go! It is an exciting and busy time as we look ahead to the users testing the app and seeing what they think. As a developer I have found the star rating system we can use alongside text feedback in our feedback forms are particularly useful in gauging the feeling of users about a feature or how we have designed the solution for them.
We are adding more users in ready for testing, so we look forward to new and different viewpoints this time around. Putting the final changes to the configurable data in SharePoint has really reinforced how flexible the app will be. It was great to see how easily we could copy/paste from Excel, hit Save on SharePoint and see the drop-down menus in the task screen change. From a few example tasks from the last testing round to 145 tasks this time, in a variety of categories! It is really starting to take shape now and you can see how flexible this configurable approach will be for reporting in the future. Our fingers are itching for PowerBI reports now and putting our skills to the test, but that will have to wait until the next build phase.
We have also been working on the solution packaging ready for deploying the updated app to test again next week, making effective use of environment variables to try and make the installation of the app as flexible as configuring the app itself. It is amazing how many different things you add in over at the Power Platform into solutions and help the organisation installing the app have an easy time repointing all those annoying things that change between different local authorities. We love how Microsoft is making it easier for us to share our work across the public sector with tools like this and it should help us help each other more in the future.