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Are Betas Taking On Lives of Their Own?
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."
It's a bad idea to put two male betas in the same bowl as they WILL fight to the death..
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
GMail is still "beta" yet I haven't seen in forever any new changes. Also, I don't think they would have released so many invites if they were still seriously working on it. You don't let that huge of a population use something that is truly still "beta."
All your searching needs (and free money!) - 4Lancer.net
ICQ was like that (I dont know if it still is, I haven't used it for years.). They'd just be in permanent beta. What a cop out. Grow a set and put a "release" stamp on it, bugs and all. Works for Microsoft.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'll post the final version of my comment. This one is still in beta.
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
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!
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.
I agree that selling software actually labeled as beta is a bad idea, but don't we already pay for software that require constant patching, such as the latest release versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, and nearly all of the latest games? Does release software even live up to the quality expected?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Most of googles products, except for searching of course, deserve nothing more than "Beta" status. They are like me, they start great, impress people, but never finish the dang project and fail to realize potential. Froogle or Google News anyone?
Google's kind of more following the open source philosophy of "if it's 1.0, that means something". Just open source projects use 0.* version numbers and Google says "beta". None of this Microsoft crap of releasing something half finished as 1.0 and tinkering and maybe by version 3.1 it will be usable. No, Google is going with the idea that if you say it's done, [i]it's actually done.[/i] But in the meantime that isn't any reason to stop you from using it.
Not really. Google, for example, uses the term "beta" to mean "unsupported". gmail, maps, froogle, etc.. they're
all neat tools but Google hasn't really decided whether or not any of those projects merit the full force of
Google behind them, but it costs Google next to nothing to provide them on their site.
Apple does the same thing. Quicktime Broadcaster is beta.. hell, Apple has called it "a technology example" not
a finished product.
The question becomes, would you rather companies not release their little pet projects at all?
You beta believe it..
>Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products
You can't claim the other way around doesn't work either.
Microsoft has been shipping beta-quality products as "Final Release" for years and they've done sooo well for themselves!
P.S. I don't really think so, it's just a joke.
It clarifies between "working" and "rock solid".
There is a reason NASA doesn't send the latest "working" laptops up to the space station, it's because you can only say something is "rock solid" after very extensive testing.
My gmail account isn't any better or worse that it would have been, it's just I know not to run anything mission critical off it.
More things should be in beta, there are too many things that claim to be rock solid that aren't.
At the same time, I don't condone the abuse of "beta" to avoid offering proper support... but we haven't seen widespread abuse (yet) whereas we have seen widespread abuse of people claiming things are solid and secure when they are not.
If you want to use debian unstable or fedora vs debian woody or red hat enterprise it's better to be making an informed decision than one based on marketing.
As ICQ counted down the seconds to release "in 3..2..1" ardent enemies postpone event by screaming "I call bullshit." No word yet on whether the popular chat software will ever be officially released or whether proc6's head has exploded from this offensive post.
More news at 5:00.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
and
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?
If you lower expectations enough, you don't have to spend any money do to the last 10% of development that takes 90% of the time.
:)
It's so very modern
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Anybody who lived through it will know what I'm talking about. I ran Public Beta as my primary OS from its introduction till the 10.0 release, and for $100 I didn't get much of an improvement.
:)
All has been forgiven since then, though.
If slashdot would conform to standards it would render correctly. When slashdot conforms to IE, non-IE browsers may have difficulty. It's that simple.
Having said that, I haven't ever had slashdot render incorrectly in firefox.
I've heard (I admit I don't know how reliable the info is, so this is typical Slashdot gossip) that a lot of google features remain "beta" so they don't have to deliver them to certain technology alliance subscribers. Ever.
Whatever happened to the good old days when users *expected* version 1 to be the unstable version and that version 2 or 3 is when the good stuff comes out? In the time it took for Phoenix/Fire(bird|fox) finally exited beta, Netscape had gone from version 1 to version 2 to version 3... anyway, my thoughts on this...
1/ Overuse of betas will lead to a diminishing of the meaning of beta. Favorite examples would be ICQ and Firefox. I used Firefox since 0.6, and it's worked beautifully for me ever since. But *despite the fact that it worked fine enough to serve as my primary browser*, it was considered beta. As more and more people discover this little fact that "beta doesn't really mean beta" then its meaning will diminish. Next thing we know, we'll be talking about long alpha periods.
2/ The versioning system is supposed to give people a good idea of what kinds of changes there have been. The use of beta names diminishes and distorts that. Once again, I return to Firefox. The amount of changes made between 0.6 and 1.0 of FF is tremendous. Based on what is seen on paper, it was more substantial than what 1.0->1.5 would be. With perpetual betas, people have that magical 1.0 barrier that they can't break. So there is a compression and thus distortion of version numbering.
3/ It's a cute new way to push aside blame. Well, it's a beta product, so if it's broke, it's not our fault. Of course, there are time when this *should* have been used (and not used), like Netscape 6. But it's being overused.
4/ This is just pure nostalgia, but I miss the good old days when version numbers would leap ahead and people would be in anticipation of exciting new features. Now, version numbers creep from beta1 to beta2 to beta3 and while there are still cool and exciting changes, they seem marginalized.
I strongly believe that betas should be used for things that are legitimately under development. As soon as it's stable enough that the developer would feel comfortable with using it on a regular basis without it completely blowing up, it's 1.0. Save the perfection and endless tweaking and bugfixing for 1.1 or 2.0; I have yet to see a perfect 1.0, even if eons of time have been funneled into perfection.
if you do not charge for it and people still rely on it you may still be liable (in negligance) if it does not work.
If it is in "beta" there is one further barrier that someone must jump over to successfully sue you.
J
BTW IAAL and I know I can't spell
what's the big deal?! I have used programs that were very functional that never reached version 1. But I was happy, so what it's version 0.8, it met all my needs! Better than the version 5.5 that doesn't!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
to a computer scientist, a hacker is someone who tinkers with access to a supposedly secure system, for not necessarily malicious intent... in fact, such testing of the defenses can even be construed as beneficial
to the general public, a hacker is tantamount to an online terrorist, period
to a computer scientist, p2p is an evolving paradigm, where everything from spare processor cycles to segments of larger files that can be reassembled on the fly can be traded to amplify the power of the internet
to the general public, p2p is where you get free music, period
to a computer scientist, beta connotes a program that isn't ready for final release yet
to the general public, beta connotes an offering from a large computer company/ gateway portal that is just unsupported
now some may see these changing word definitions as some sort of repugnant dumbing down of vital concepts, concepts important to areas of endeavour that some care passionately about, and they resent it
but i assert, from the standpoint of a realist, that since the internet is a phenomenon whose impact reaches beyond the realm of ivory tower computer scientists, such a dumbing down effect of certain terms previously secluded to the realm of computer science is just inevitable, unavoidable, and shouldn't be a reason for any reaction except a rolling of the eyes and maybe some laughter
all words evolve in terms of meaning and usage over time, and computer scientists, even if they invented the terminology, don't own word definitions
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that "beta" no longer means what it used to. I remember when you had to be someone special to get a beta version of a program, back when my friends would come over and say, "Guess what I managed to get my hands on?" and they'd be waving around a beta version of some popular product and we'd all go, "Wow, how did you manage that?"
However, I also remember the days when a "syndicated" television program meant network reruns. A show that was original in syndication would have confused everyone.
So although I completely agree with you that "beta doesn't really mean beta" anymore, and that we also need a reliable way to know exactly how stable a product is (and whether or not the developers are taking any responsibility for its failings), I don't know that it's a disaster that this is happening. I'm not willing to cry, "No, that's not what beta means, you're violating the ancient traditions of software development!"
Maybe that's going to be what beta comes to mean next. Maybe the new beta is going to be a product perpetually in development with users responsible for quality control. Maybe it's going to become "open testing, no liability" software. Maybe instead of being a phase of software development, beta will become a style of software development.
I can't predict the future, so I can't say, but I do know there are some marginally decent original syndicated television programs these days. So yes, while I note the word isn't the same beta I grew up with, I'm willing to sit back and see what evolves out of this. I do want a word which clearly expresses to me what I can expect from a given level of a product, but if "beta" is no longer that word, well, no disaster.
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
Beta prevents the need for support but allows you to sell/release your product. This is a dream as it prevents those damn leeches called "consumers" from harassing them.
It would seem even Slashdot is caught up in the Beta craze.
c m2000
http://developers.slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#
^_^
Really? A quick look at sourceforge shows 14799 projects in beta, while there are a total of 38186 projects in a pre-beta state. Compare that to the 13509 total projects in a post-beta state. Most telling, the largest single development status is Planning, with 15049 projects in that state. Making the assumption that sourceforge is representative of the open source development world, I'd draw that conclusion that over half (based on a total of 66494 total active projects on sourceforge at the time of this writing) of all open source projects don't even get to a usable state (another assumption: a project in a beta state is far enough along to be used by more than the development team and uber power users).
Of course, this all depends on how one defines beta, and since sourceforge developers get to set their own statuses, what they think may be beta code is really mature, or production/stable could actually be alpha. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.
The article largely faults Google, Mozilla, and other recent products, but IMHO, Microsoft are as much to blame as anyone.
A Microsoft "beta" is more of an early alpha or first-run-able release put out for marketing purposes. Certainly not a feature-complete release needing bug-fixes, as the beta tag normally suggests.
This is typically followed by a number of "release candidates," which Microsoft ships for months or even YEARS before the product is finalized and boxed. The industry traditionally considers a release-candidate a final product that could potentially be boxed and shipped if it successfully meets the testing and quality guidelines. Microsoft seem to call their betas "release candidates," where none but the last few builds might merit that title.
These releases are occasionally supplemented by "preview releases," "early experience" releases, and similar euphemistic builds.
What all this amounts to is that the public testing period is lengthened and the status of the product is artificially inflated in order to keep the product in the press. This has the neat (for Microsoft) side-effect of creating plenty of FUD around competing products.
Witness the endless steam of Longhorn early releases, stories, and leaks. Every one intended to keep corporate and other buyers from even *considering* adopting strategies involving Linux, MacOS X, or other alternate platforms.
Longhorn (or insert next great Microsoft product here) is *always* coming "just around the bend." Just wait a little longer. There's no need to switch to something else. Have a look at this cool new "Longhorn preview release." What? No, of course we haven't been promising a new database file system since at least the Cairo beta days......
Well Alpha is Latin for "Doesn't work" and Beta is Latin for "Still doesn't work"
For as long as I can remember the meanings were something along the lines of...
Delta - Very early development. Planning phase.
Alpha - Still adding features. Doing basic testing.
Beta - Features frozen. Only fixing bugs. Lots of heavy testing.
Doesn't this mean anything to anyone any more?
This was the first article I saw when I woke up this morning, and for a minute I thought I'd woken up in Brave New World...
This is mildly unrelated, but I am irritated as to how much the word "beta" is thrown around. It is not so much an issue with professional developers, but an issue with individuals that mis-classify an alpha, or even just a concept demo as "beta." Admittedly, this mistake is most often made outside the realm of software development and more in the area of 3rd party maps for FPS games, and in flash portals (such as Newgrounds). The term "beta" is often used in these realms as an excuse for laziness.
My point is ultimately that the misuse of the term "beta" to describe anything other than a software project that is ready for public testing in order to repair bugs and refine operation actually devalues the term. (at least in the world of software anyway) It does NOT mean that you were lazy and didn't feel like finishing something, and it does not excuse:
-Poor animation.
-BSP errors.
-Infinitely repeating textures.
-100% saturation lighting.
-Excessive use of colored lighting.
-Using your pre-pubescent voice for your animation recorded via your OEM computer mic.
-Hard P's into a microphone, and while we are at it, hard S's as well.
-General sucktitude.
-Bad level concept.
-Being anywhere between the ages of 11-17. (I don't care if you are "only 12" if your movie sucked, it sucked, and unless you stop sucking you should stop acting as though you don't)
-Completely lacking skill.
I could go on forever as to what the term "beta" does not describe, but that would mean no breakfast and that would be the real tragedy around here.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
A slight exageration on his part there, but according to many world religions, fish dont have souls.
Google has already struck deals with some news sites regarding registration: The NY Times likes getting traffic from Google News, and so it lets people who click on the Google links read the stories withotu registering.
Similar deals could prevent lawsuits: News sites who want to get linked to would have to agree not to sue for copyright infringement when Google summarizes their stories. (I'm referrring only to Google News itself, of course: Cutting a deal with a search engine shouldn't affect a site's ranking in the main index.)
It used to be much simpler than that, with just three pretty clear phases for testing and QA.
Obviously you start with your in-house testing, hopefully a constant background activity as you write new code. This is just routine development activity, and might include unit testing, regression testing, and more. A lot of this will be done locally on specific areas of the software.
As you reach the end of the new feature development for your coming release, you bring everything together to build a complete version of the whole product. This is your first alpha release, and you run all the system tests, integration tests, etc. If there are serious failures identified here, they get passed back to the relevant dev teams, and we go back to the previous step until everyone brings their revised contributions together for the next alpha.
As an aside, obviously for smaller projects you might be working with complete builds from almost day one. In this case calling something an "alpha release" is giving it rather more significance than it really has: you're just identifying a "mental marker" where you switch focus from localised to global testing.
When we have what we believe is a solid alpha build, we might want to ship it to a select group of customers and prospects. This is a beta release. It's not supposed to be a marketing exercise; it's an opportunity to get feature-complete code tested in a wider variety of realistic contexts than you can ever create in-house, so that you have a better chance of finding any subtle bugs before release: hardware incompatibilities, interoperability problems with data from other applications, etc. As with alphas, if serious flaws are identified, we go right back to the dev teams at step 1 to get them fixed, and then go through the process of localised testing, global testing, and potentially (but this used to be a rare event) running a second beta test.
Note that further formal alpha tests should never be necessary at this stage. Once a project has passed an alpha test, no code changes should ever come through in the future that don't. If they do, they weren't properly regression tested. Hence you re-run all the system and integration tests as part of the next beta/final release testing just to be safe, but you don't expect to have another alpha cycle.
When you've run a beta test and are happy that you've got enough bugs for your software to be a product your customers want to buy from you, you make the release. The problem today is that marketing droids have taken over the beta release process; it's no longer about improving code quality in partnership with carefully chosen customers/prospects for everyone's benefit, it's about promoting your software before it's ready to manage customer expectations and get community support built up so you don't have to support it yourself. The additional testing and consequent quality improvement is often negligible.
For those who missed it, this implies that you ought to be feature-complete before going into alpha, though you might change something significant if your system tests identify a weakness you hadn't noticed before (e.g., the combination of features written in practice doesn't meet a requirement completely). Anything going out as a beta should be both feature-complete and very well tested internally. A lot of places would assume you'd get some significant flaws identified during the beta programme -- that's why you run it, after all -- but certainly anything beyond the first beta release should be a "release candidate".
I have no idea where this notion of several beta builds then several release candidates came from. Nor do I know when it became a Good Idea(TM) to make major functionality changes after you've entered the beta phase; doing so pretty much negates the point of the previous alpha and beta tests. It's certainly not a good approach to QA, and perhaps it's also why so many companies now seem determined to run year-long, 17-release beta programmes instead of shipping a finished product, and then a new release with the extra features customers requested six months later.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.