Donabate Match Helper
A stroke-allocation tool for club matchplay golf — paused deliberately before release, once it became clear the club itself needed to be in the loop first.
Key Features & Outcomes
- Answers one specific question well — playing off which tees, how many strokes given or received, on which holes — instead of a generic handicap calculator
- 22 tests passing and a working build before the pause, not an idea left unstarted
- A written pre-mortem set explicit stop conditions before a single line of UI was manually exercised in a browser
The idea
A Donabate Golf Club member setting up a singles matchplay round needs to know exactly how many strokes they give or receive, and on which holes — today that means manually cross-referencing handicaps against the stroke index table for the specific tees being played. A small, correct answer to one real question.
Why it stopped
It began as a technical prototype, not something the club requested or sponsored. The stroke-index data and matchplay allowance both needed verification against Donabate's own authoritative source before a real member could trust the output — and there was no authorised route to test it with real members without the club's involvement.
Rather than ship a plausible-looking tool that could hand someone the wrong strokes in a real match, the project paused itself at a written decision point: a delivery baseline document recording exactly what was proven, what wasn't, and what would need to be true before it could resume.
Why it matters
The tests passed, the build worked — the thing that stopped it wasn't a technical problem at all. It's the clearest example in this whole portfolio of a pre-mortem doing its job: catching "I have no authorised way to verify this is correct" before release, not after someone used it for a real match.