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'?"

Comments

Simple explanation

[rd4tech]

It's quite simple actually:
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 :) (in the software I mean :) )

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.

Re:Simple explanation

[rzuwik]

well, there used to be a custom (there still is?) that a bridge would be beta tested by a line of trucks filled with sand, with the main engineer sitting _under_ the bridge.

how's that for developer responsibility? :)

Re:Simple explanation

[torinth]

Which is bad, since, as we all know, there isn't any valid excuse for having bugs :) (in the software I mean :) )

Not true. Bugs are a resource problem. Take a fixed team of developers and a fixed time for development and you have to sacrific either stability, security, or features.

Desktop and most corporate customers demand features far more than they demand stability. It's a fact of life. Everybody complained about bugs in the 9x branch of Windows, but stayed with it because of the exclusive features (including market penetration).

The solution is to supply more resources, which means that your product must involve more developers, and/or take more time. So there's a plenty good excuse: nobody wants to wait for progress in software.

For the few markets that do, like some financial and government projects, stability is very important, and so these projects take a hell of a lot more time and money to develop.

No Risk

[patdabiker]

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.

Re:Beta Stuff

[SamBeckett]

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 ;)

Maybe not "commerical interest", but nonetheless you are trying to get some. I haxxored your site and found the following psuedo-SQL code:

SELECT phone_number FROM users WHERE sex='F';

FOR EACH phone_number DIAL phone_number AND BREATHE HEAVILY;

I miss

[Phosphor3k]

The test server that was up before slashdot switched.

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.

/me sniffs

eBay

[eviljolly]

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

These sites are free.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

lowered expectations

[willCode4Beer.com]

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?

Beta = Better

[DJ Rubbie]

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...

Proper testing nomenclature

[raistphrk]

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.

Top ten reasons (beta version)

[PsiPsiStar]

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.

Almost as silly as "Under Construction" gifs

[poulbailey]

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 !

Re:It's overused because everything's in beta

[JamieF]

Beta testing doesn't mean "under development", it means "in a testing phase that includes customers / users". So, saying that software is always in beta because it's always in development is incorrect. Also, software is not always in development. Plenty of software apps are abandoned or put on life support (bug fixes only but no new features) by their owners.

A project that always adds features and fixes bugs at the same time is a very badly managed project. Beta testing is a phase in the software development lifecycle. It's a cycle for a reason: people want features and don't want bugs, but new features introduce new bugs. Every time you add features, you have to text and fix and get it back to a point of stability.

Any decently managed project has a cutoff period where new features are not allowed, so that bugs can be fixed to a point where the team decides that it's OK to release the software. Sometimes this is an ad-hoc decision balancing bug counts with market pressure, and sometimes it's just a threshold of bug counts of various severities. Then, when the release is done, the feature wish list is examined and the feature list for the next release is set.

Open source projects that rely mainly on code donors still do this, but they don't necessarily know exactly what features are going into the next version since they can't predict what code will be donated. Still, the folks managing the project must at some point decide that a release is needed, and work toward a stable, release-worthy point, or else the project will just be an ongoing death march of brokenness and half-completed features.

Beta means that the project team doesn't think that the code is releaseable yet, but it's past the point of feature cutoff, and past the internal testing phase. They're giving the users a chance to beat on the software to find any esoteric bugs that internal testing missed, before telling the world that the software is believed to be stable and correct.