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Are Betas Taking On Lives of Their Own?

Posted by Zonk on from the night-of-the-living-beta dept.

Ant writes "CNET News.com's Paul Festa thinks the final stage of software development, beta versions, are taking on a life of their own, as companies tinker endlessly with their products in public according to a recent article. Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products."

3 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Perpetual beta sucks by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The old style of perpetual beta was lazy, perfectionistic, or excessively cautious programmers simply going on and on towards v1.0 and never reaching it. Not enough work was done - typical of the lazy programmer. It's never "good enough" to call v1.0, typical of the perfectionist view, despite the fact that the program has been out in general use for years.

    Now, we have the new perpetual beta. Any company can, with a wave of the magic wand, make itself blameless when its software doesn't work. "But it's in beta!" they gleefully shout when you tell them about something that doesn't work correctly. "Refer it to our testing team, who will ignore your report."

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  2. Fear of commitment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a simple case of fear of commitment (or litigation). If a product is beta, you don't have to really support it, and if it breaks it's really no big deal. It is, after all, a beta version.

    Once you make the jump to release versions then suddenly everything has to run (nearly) perfectly and any issues need to be properly dealt with. Perpetual beta has it's advantages in that you simple don't deal with these problems. Or you don't deal with them formally, but you do fix them.

    Google News is stuck in beta because Google can and will be sued the instant they start trying to make money (via text ads or something) off other sites headlines and stories.

  3. Does anyone know what beta means anymore? by DingerX · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:
    Once considered the final stage of software development, beta versions ...

    and
    The beta version, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, typically refers to the second stage of software testing. Traditionally distributed to a limited group of testers, it follows the alpha version, which is tested in the lab.


    What little training I had seemed to involve code existing in four stages of development, and beta was the second:

    Alpha: the phase in the development cycle where code first comes into being. Subsystems are being built, and testing takes place on the that (subsystem) level.
    Beta: the phase in the cycle where all subsystems are nominally in place, and testing occurs on the system level; not everything works, and features may be added, but we're looking at the whole code.
    Final: features are locked down, the system is tested in the form it intends to be released. I believe, under the influence of someone like Microsoft, this is now referred to as "Release Candidate" stage.
    Released: The software has been distributed.

    On the other hand, this article implies another notion of software development stages, one that I see applied rather frequently:

    Alpha: Testing done in house.
    Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.

    So does someone have the answer? What the hell do these terms mean, and are they useful any more?