Every time I find a bug in our development version of Backboard a little parade goes on in my head.  Or I’m at the circus and I’ve just knocked over an impossible milk bottle pyramid.  I’ve found a flaw that one of our users won’t have to.  It feels great.

As the Business Analyst intern here at Increo, it’s been a wild ride.  I’ve marketed and promoted, I’ve made a screencast video for the Backboard homepage, I’ve represented the company at a marketing forum, and I’ve written about Backboard in blurbs and pieces like this.  That’s all been a blast—but most new and maybe most rewarding has been helping develop Backboard through bug testing.  I’ve joined my co-workers in the eternal struggle to root out errors by hitting the different browsers (cough…IE) with all I’ve got.  And like a fine wine, my appreciation for the process has matured as I’ve realized just how much of a team we really are.  None of us are done until everyone has completed their assigned tasks—and tasks are passed around because of the varying experience and expertise of our team.  All the while I sit, wide-eyed, and hope to feed the Backboard team more and more bugs to seek and destroy.

Beyond finding bugs, I get to partake in our discussions about what we want for the site and for our users.  And it’s cool to think that my suggestions and opinions might touch the lives of people around the world.  Before I start dreaming big though, I should get back to the grind because we have a release to put out.  And I’ll promise this: It’ll be a great one.

As Increo is currently in a period of nose-to-the-grindstone development (preparing a new release of Backboard), I thought I’d step back and take a look at one of the articles written about Backboard just after our initial launch.

Marc Hustvedt, angel investor blogger behind seedWatcher, a blog that tracks early-stage startups reviewed Backboard back in May.

The pro’s of Backboard, are clearly its painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. [...] Anyone can comment on a document if they’re given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

As we add functionality to Backboard, we’re careful to leave the basic lightweight use case Marc mentions intact. Our hope is that you will continue to find creating a Backboard as easy as when Backboard was first introduced.

Marc continues:
The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I’d like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It’s also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it’s going to get wide-scale business use. [...]

This is where Backboard has made tremendous strides over the past few months. I’m excited to launch markup support (easy enough for your most time-pressed client) in the coming weeks. We have also launched security for confidential documents.

Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way.

Plans are certainly in the works to continue producing tools to help companies innovate.