Ralph and Marie love tennis. They play almost every day, and they never miss watching the major tournaments on TV. The oldest tennis tournament in the world, Wimbledon, is now playing, and both Ralph and Marie want to do more than just watch the championships unfold on their televisions.
The next John McEnroe
Ralph wants to play in the Wimbledon finals, so he visits Wimbledon.org on his laptop and registers.
When he finds the tournament bracket, Ralph sees that the semifinals are being played today.
Ralph wants to play in the finals, so he clicks on the finals' spot in the bracket. Nothing happens. The Wimbledon web application doesn’t do what Ralph's wants so he decides that there must be a functional defect.
Getting close to the action
Marie wants to watch the Wimbledon finals, so she visits Wimbledon.org on her tablet and registers.
She finds the tickets page, and sees that the option to buy tickets for the finals only shows up yesterday on the tournament calendar.
Marie knows that the finals have been re-scheduled three times due to rain, so they were not played yesterday.
When Marie clicks on yesterday's date, she is presented with the message, "Please select a date that is not in the past."
So Marie selects the actual re-scheduled date of the finals and is presented with a message that says, "There are no events scheduled for this day."
As Designed vs. Functional
Both Ralph and Marie contact the Wimbledon.org developer.
Ralph provides the steps to recreate the issue that prevented him from participating in the tournament,
and
Marie provides the steps to recreate the issue that prevented her from buying tickets to watch the finals.
Linus, the Wimbledon.org application developer sends messages to both Ralph and Marie thanking them for their feedback.
In Ralph’s message, Linus’s includes the following: "Unfortunately, the Wimbledon.org web application doesn’t have the capability to enter users into the players’ bracket. The application works as designed."
In Marie’s message, Linus includes the following: "The tournament calendar’s data-source connection was broken, but because of your feedback we have repaired the connection and the calendar now updates dynamically."
Ralph is now taking tennis lessons, and Marie is a new user interface tester.