Free Water Audit Software

The Free Water Audit Software (FWAS) has seen exponential growth in adoption since original release (v1) in the mid-2000s – with over 13,000 downloads to date of the most recently released version (v5.0, 2014). There continues to be growth in the North American water industry for the FWAS as the industry-standard tool for conducting a top-down water balance and assessment of associated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The FWAS Development Group has received and processed over 1,000 comments on the FWAS through last few years, including the dedicated development periods of pre-alpha, alpha, beta gamma, and then pre-release testing.

From this extensive feedback and acknowledging the ever-growing expansion of potential users for the tool, nine (9) key design objectives for the FWAS v6.0 were established, as follows:

• Accommodate a very wide range of water system setups, including small to large, retail vs. wholesale, own supply vs. purchased supply, metered vs. unmetered, and many more parameters that can widely vary across the over 50,000 water systems in North America;
• Accommodate a very wide range of user knowledge, from first-time FWAS users to highly experienced water loss management practitioners;
• Achieve sufficient technical detail and rigor for tool effectiveness;
• Achieve sufficient simplicity for tool efficiency;
• Minimize cognitive load on the user interface through enhanced tool intuitiveness;
• Maximize awareness of user for best-practices through data grading questions and identification of limiting criteria;
• Remove any Data Grading criteria subjectivity or ambiguity that existed in FWAS v5.0;
• Update Data Grading criteria questions where needed to reflect best-practice or technological advancements;
• Minimize inevitable variance that will be observed in total Data Validity Score for any given audit, with same or similar input parameters, between FWAS v5.0 and FWAS v6.0.

One can quickly see that most design objectives directly compete with at least one other design objective. Ultimately, many decisions in the development of v6.0 came down to weighing different objectives against one another and determining the best balance that would serve the most users.