Slashdot Mirror
Mo' Beta Testing Blues
theodp writes "Wired picks up on the observation made by Jason Fried that more and more sites and tools are launching and remaining in 'beta' mode. Prominent sites like Google News, A9, Froogle, Friendster, Tribe, and Orkut all sport 'Beta' disclaimers. Is this to get users to do the testing, a subtle way of saying 'don't expect support', or simply a marketing ploy to generate buzz by making users feel 'exclusive'?"
Maybe it signifies, like in the case of my site Slashster, that it actually IS in alpha.
The problem, I think, is what companies consider to be alpha / beta / whatnot. Alpha is when a product is still in development / testing. Beta is when the project is feature complete, and all that's going on is bugfixing.
Sites like Friendster, Tribes, Orkut, Slashster, do not have a concrete definition of "complete". There's always more functionality to add, always stuff to incorperate, and is ever-evolving. Therefore, it never gets out of alpha / beta phase.
As for my site, as long as there's no true commercial interest within my work, it will most likely stay as "alpha." Not to say that people shouldn't expect support, but rather that they shouldn't expect things to necessarily work either ;)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It's quite simple actually:
:) (in the software I mean :) )
today you have to develop things fast
faster development = more bugs
beta version= decreased liability (because of the bugs) while still collecting profits/'name-building'/etc
For example Google API is in a 'forewer beta', they state: "The Google Web APIs service is currently in beta form and has not been fully tested or debugged. Accordingly, Google disclaims any responsibility for any harm resulting from your use of Google Web APIs. "
Imagine if a bridge building company would say something like this. It's plain scary. I mean, get some IT marketing guy and he'll find a way how 'the drivers should do the initial bridge testing'.
What's scary is that even the free projects lately are starting be quite-Beta-excusable for the bugs. Which is bad, since, as we all know, there isn't any valid excuse for having bugs
Now, the thing to do is to patent this Beta concept for selling out half baked potatos for the full price, if you live in Europe that is.
If something goes wrong, you can't blame the site. It's beta. If the product sucks, it shouldn't (theoretically) be able to tarnish the name of a great such as Google. Takes all the risk out of it.
But whether Google's API works or not is simply an annoyance. The bridge can kill people (or try to teach them to fly, depending on how you look at it).
You need to save that analogy for the air-traffic control and space shuttle software. Which, by the way, is not released in beta form.
The test server that was up before slashdot switched.
/me sniffs
Brak was his name, wasn't it? Oh, we had some good times together. Crazy stories, everyone had mod points. Ah yes, that was the day.
MMORPG's by far have been the most beta quality software I've ever had the experience to pay and test at the same time. I have played every MMO launched since Asheron's call as part of working for warcry news network and I can tell you you're always playing beta quality code.
To be fair it may just be more of a "work in progress" than beta but still you have to live with the bugs or move onto another game which will be in the same situation.
I opted into the "new and improved" eBay 2.0. There was a way to opt out at first, but ebay took that option away and locked it's users into using eBay 2.0. eBay then offered "workshops" to let users give their input, and after reading pages and pages of people screaming they want to be able to switch back to the older version, they just seemed to ignore them and answer questions related to how they could improve the atrocious interface of their new monster. Ebay seemed to lose a few buyers, and even some of their power-sellers because they would not give us back the link to opt out of eBay 2.0. So now I'm stuck with eBay 2.0, with no way to opt out. All I can say is that I'm glad I don't sell much because I heard it can be a pain in the ass now. :)
More information about eBay's workshops can be found at....
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/marketing.shtml
using the term "beta" gives a clear impression that everything is mostly there, but there is more work to be done.
I would much perfer a site say they are beta instead of putting out non working features.
This is the era following "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", guys. Remember "release early and release often"? Of course they are soliciting users as beta testers. Microsoft does that all the time. And of course it is a marketing ploy. May I suggest a third option: compare this to the way that Doom was first released. This way of releasing is not only meant to make people feel exclusive or valued, it is also a way of gaining mind share (==market share) before the actual product is even released. Wake up, this is the 21st century Internet :)
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
You're not paying for these sites, so what do you expect?
Open source software does this a lot as well. And it touches stuff that I use right now: the Scons build system is stuck at version 0.95. Mozilla Thunderbird is at version 0.6. Mozilla Firefox is at 0.8. Does this mean that there's anything glaringly wrong about the functionality that they provide? No. It means that there may be a couple of rough edges and that work is still ongoing to finish less important features and to polish up the project. If they were boxed products on the shelf I'd be upset, but since I paid a total of $0 - and they work for me - I don't care what the version number is.
Anyway, I think this is a reflection of the development model more than anything else. Commercial software tends to have a "really big design up front", followed by a bunch of milestones to implement. Open source software (and web-based applications like Google) tend to be more organic. More a work of sculpting one feature at a time than a messy work of planned burocracy. The features that are important tend to be implemented first. And given that the core 10% of most software's features is used 90% of the time - this isn't a problem to most users.
Maybe its the result of a constant demand for newer versions and features.
Many companies (mine included) are under constant pressure to release new products with more features. Often this means that instead of fixing bugs making products better, we are working on the next release.
Perhaps the constant *beta* is a marketing ploy. Tell people its beta and they can't complain when bugs are found. So what if the product never comes out of beta.
Classic example. Has there ever been a non-beta version of ICQ?
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
or maybe it's like the 80s thing with the ripped jeans... "c'mon mom, database errors are cool. the site isn't supposed to work... you just don't get it."
When it comes to software, everything's beta in a sence. It's always under development. Since when does a company release software and then just stop development but still consider it active? Operating systems are always being updated and do so automatically. Windows has been in beta since version 1. Linux is in beta and is updated constantly. When I buy a car, it's not beta. It's complete and I don't expect Toyota so fedex me a better steering wheel every month. Software is intangible so by nature it can be updated constantly.
To me, beta always signified that a company was to release the software soon and I could get a "preview" for free. However, as the article points out, marketting departments are trying to alter the definition of the word to suit them. I don't know if this is good or bad, it's just more marketting.
Well, duh, beta is another way to spell 'better', so the 'beta edition' must mean the 'better edition'. Unlike final versions, like how they say it's final, but they didn't say 'better' or 'beta'! =P
Hmm, wait a minute, this piece of beta software I have running seems to be misbehaving...
Please direct all bug reports to
Icq weren't a site, but stayed a long time in beta (still are?), but it was because Mirabilis was thinking about charge for the service.
Maybe it's some sort of legal move to do anything you want with the service without people complaing...
Too many companies and programmers seem to lack a good understanding of what "beta" software really is, because a lot of software they release as beta-grade is really alpha-grade. While there are fairly extensive breakdowns of the development process, I think you can basically divide the quality assurance cycle of a product into four main points.
Pre-alpha grade software is software that is only being tested internally. It probably doesn't work at all. Perhaps some modules work, but it'll mostly be broken until later builds.
Alpha-grade software is software with new features that has yet to be tested, perhaps with the exception of some internal testing. As a result, when you participate with in an alpha test for a piece of software, you're getting a bug-ridden product to say the least. Things probably won't work the way they should; the software will probably crash; and to say the very least, that build shouldn't be rolled out onto a production machine.
Beta-grade software is software that is more-or-less finished, but is being released for a wider test to work out any undiscovered bugs from the previous development stages. A beta-grade product should be production ready, but generally you won't want to roll it out until the final release builds are made.
Your post-beta, or gold stage, is really just the final builds of the product. By that time, any of those builds are ready for market, but they may run through a few compilations just to do last-minute checks.
A lot of companies attach the term "beta" on alpha-grade software simply because they think it'll drum up more PR for the product. In reality, they're just giving their customers a load of bull. That being said, I've found a lot of beta products to be incredibly solid. Mozilla and Opera are two great examples. While they may crash occasionally, or I might find a bug or two if I dig really hard, I could see those beta builds being out on the market.
The sites mentioned, as well as Spymac ( first with 1 GB email), exist as proofs of concept with a presumption of falsifiability. There was no way to know beforehand if they'd be viable, no way to test if they'd fail without putting them on the road. This is in contrast to the dotcom burnrate days, when every concept was presumed roadworthy from the moment of conception on a cocktail napkin. Beta is a good thing, it's a sign of maturity (ironically enough).
1. Microsoft has made shit the industry standard.
2. Plan and code has been changed to 'guess and check'
3. Companies want to see if somthing will be popular and generate revenue before they put money into making it work.
4. Another way of disclaiming liability.
5. Sounds 'techie.'
6. Peer pressure.
7. People want customers to help with debugging.
8. Change is constant. So is Beta testing.
9. Dotcom crash has scared people. Folks want to 'see the money' as soon as possible.
10. Companies realize that because of revisions to UCITA, enforcement of shrinkwrap liscenses, etc. that they're not going to be held liable for the problems that they cause, above the price a customer has paid for the product which is almost never enough to justify any kind of lawsuit in the first place.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Although beta testing is an somewhat important phase in the software and testing life cycle, it is not one you should depend on too heavily. A test plan should be developed after the requirements have been put together and all testing should be executed in each of the phases of the project, being flexible enough to change as possibly new requirements enter the project. Testing of software is usually done poorly and many projects have little focus on the testing process. It's not necessarily the most fun process, but one that is important and should be done by a highly skilled team that is both creative and smart. If your project is relying on beta testing to find a substantial set of errors and defects in your software, your software is probably doomed.
Software engineering really is that, engineering, but it is often not looked at this way. Writing code is the easiest part of it all but many steps and procedures should be used to ensure the highest quality and robustness of software possible. We have way too many under-educated, non-read and undisciplined developers/managers that really need to observe other fields of engineering, such as civil enginering/construction to see what we need to do to make software development of higher quality.
I will now step down from my soap-box.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I don't understand this beta nonsense. Once it's launched, it's launched I'd say. It's fine that Google labels GMail as beta since it's relatively closed at the moment and hasn't had a "proper" launch yet.
Google News, on the other hand, might as well use a stupid animated "Under Construction" gif for their pages, since it seems to be in perpetual beta. The service launched (ie. left the Google Labs) all the way back in September, 2002 !
You can say something similar about A9. It extends Google, and adds in-book searching, search history features, the toolbar diary, etc. It is a good place for them to work on features before deploying to the actual Amazon site.
And a major reason why these might just be testbeds is that they generate no revenue. The technologies developed may be useful in their revenue-generating products. Having the public test your stuff is a great way to see how it really works.
I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that none of the items mentioned in the list will ever "go gold" as such, and will therefore never really -- which is maybe to say *enforceably* -- go through the feature feeeze/bug fix period that immediately proceeds that event. There's no real financial motivation to ever take it out of beta ( like, say, shipping product ), and there are plenty or reasons - like those mentioned by the poster - not to.
remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice
However much the designers of something try and test it, there is nothing like throwing a few thousand misguided, ignorant, diverse users (who didn't bother to read the help) at a site/piece of software. Preferably all at once. It's a damn good way of testing something; and hell they're free - so we can hardly complain!
This practice of releasing software before it's ready is hardly a new one. What do you think Windows 1.0-3.1 were? 3.11 finally was release quality software, though it still stunk. Apple did the same damn thing with OSX. 10.0 was Alpha quality software at best, with 10.1 being beta quality.
The point is that I don't think companies are releasing software any earlier than they used to, they're just being more honest about the quality of it. Google news still being beta means they can mess around with it and not piss anyone off. The article seems to imply there's something wrong with lowering peoples expectations.
AccountKiller
> truly horrifying and offensively private questions
You mean like Name, Date of Birth, Country or State of origin, and Email address?
You did realise the rest was optional didn't you?
Most fields can be left blank, and most dropdowns have a "no answer" value.
But remember, it _is_ a personal networking site. The whole point of these sites is for people to see whether or not you might interest them by the answers you give to the questions...
Advanced users are users too!