The Obligatory World Cup and Testing Blog

So my marketing manager walked up to me (I knew it was her, despite her wearing giant dark sunglasses) and said “I need you to write a blog.”

Well, sure, I mean I’ve done quite a few of those. “What about?” I rather naively asked.

“The World Cup!” She said in tones of being quite reasonable.

“Football?” There was a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.

She nodded. “It’ll be easy,” she said before scuttling away at some speed.

Testing? I know quite a bit. Performance testing. Sure. But football? Well, not so much.

In fact, I had to get help to name two famous footballers that were still playing, earlier today.

So how do I put together a blog post on football? I guess the best way is to put my performance testing and engineering hat on and see what can be done to improve it.

I mean football seems well, not quite well thought out. So what can we do to make it look more efficient?

1. The aim is to get the ball into the net at the other end of the pitch. But the goals are just too small. Make them larger and there is a better chance of the ball going into the net.
2. Now why do they use goalkeepers? They get in the way of the free flow of the ball into the net, so they need to go.
3. The distance between the two goals also seems to be larger than needed. So let’s make the pitch smaller.
4. The ball seems rather slow; it’s possible that it is an optimum size, but I would recommend that we try series of different sized balls to find out which is the best fit.
5. Now that we have removed the goalkeepers, how many of the other players actually make any difference to the outcome of the match? In the spirt of science, I watched some ten minutes of a football game. At least six players on each side didn’t really do anything except get in the way of their own players and stop the free movement of the ball, so, let’s reduce it to four people per side.
6. Why does the match continue once one of the teams has won? What defines winning? Where are the requirements?
7. There are also some people who do not belong to either team running around. Although the referee is supposed to act as a task scheduler, they actually seemed to interrupt the play more than the players. So by removing them from the field of play the ball should move more freely.
8. For some reason the match appears to be split into two parts, each 45 minutes long, with a random amount of extra time added. This is an inefficient use of the pitch, and we should look at running the match 24 hours day.
9. The match is also physically located in one country, but would it make more sense to leverage cloud technology and host part of it virtually? In fact by creating two pitches in different countries we should increase efficiency by having only one team per pitch so there will be less interruptions and (data) collisions. Also if there was a failure in one location of the stadium, then the match could continue in the other.
10. There are a very large amount of match statistics reported by the commenters, but why aren’t these being run through something like Sogeti’s CognitiveQA platform to work out how the match would turn out – without the need to even play the match? In future we could just predict the results using ARMIA or other projection methods and save time, not to mention minimise the wear and tear on the pitch and reduce even further the need to pay for players,

I’m sure there are further efficiencies that could be gained with a thorough performance review and I recommend that we select an upcoming match to serve as a proof of the concept.

Fig.1 Artist’s impression of the optimised and efficient world cup match