.On Dec 31, 2009, at 11:00 AM, gairbheil wrote: > But I've become more a fan of betaing early and betaing often, myself; having > worked both ways, I find that the more complete my app is when I first > release a beta, the less flexible I am to make changes and the less useful > the app is to my users. On the other hand, if we release a beta that's just > complete enough to basically work and to give the users a sense of what's > possible, we get invaluable feedback that shapes the direction of the app > from that point on, which makes the app more useful for everybody. Also, if > users find performance issues that we've missed, they tend to be easier to > fix early on.
There's nothing wrong with that - but this early phase you describe is traditionally called "alpha". When you've got the app you want but it still has bugs, that's traditionally called "beta". Once "beta" the app is more or less all done but for the debugging and performance tuning. The phases are described at http://softwaretestingguide.blogspot.com/2009/02/explain-alpha-beta-gamma-testing.html There's nothing wrong with what you want to do and there's nothing sacred about these labels other than they mean something specific in the industry. You are free to invent your own process and your own phase labels. It might be better if you did to avoid confusion. -Todd Blanchard [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
