What methods can you make use of for testing your code and hearing feedback on your contribution? How do you communicate with your community and audience while developing work in progress or sharing the final outcome?
In Cboard, the community is divided into three, the coder and maker of the project, the person using the communication device and their carer.
Everyone’s needs have to be met to create a good product. For the user aspect, it is important to make it very accessible and understandable for the user and caretaker. Cboard is used on a tablet, it has to be correctly calibrated to different hardware. In this case, it is important to organize testing sessions to understand how a user would use Cboard, what are their reflexes and what they want to communicate. Regular testing sessions would be a key to the best development of the project. The tests could include the test of precise parts of the project, such as tiles sizes. It will be also important to include global studies of the product being used in a non conducted test.
On the other hand, the contributor community is key. They have been the ones creating the project from the translation of the vocabulary, the drawings of the pictograms and the code. The project is present on multiple platforms allowing for better communication. They are on Github and Discord. People can easily communicate and escalate an issue. On the discord platform, they often share examples of Cboard being used. It helps for motivating the contributors and it also gives examples of how it is used. On the GitHub of the project, the use of the issues and pull requests tab are the main people contribute and rise their concerns.
Outside of Cboard, there are many ways to communicate with an audience using social media. TikTok is a good example to create interest in a project. the communication of a project depends also on the essence of a subject. A video game might have a different community and ‘needs’ than Cboard. For video games, sharing alphas and betas of the project to test would be the best action.