Some friends of mine were discussing “beta” programs. Is it a cop-out to label your first public release of something as a beta release? (e.g. Yahoo’s podcasting, Gmail, Google everything else).
On the one side you’ve got the argument that “alpha” releases are normally tested internally, and “beta” releases are your first public release to a select group to let them find any remaining flaws or logic errors.
Lately it seems that that the beta groups are getting out of hand. It wasn’t too long ago that a beta release meant you were a SELECT group, some fraction of the whole, that got to test software. In some cases, like an operating system, you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Now you get something like Yahoo podcasting and it’s basically released to everyone with a label “Beta” at the top. Is this a cop-out to discredit any flaws or errors? “Hey, your software gave me an error right after it pulled up the wrong file!” “Well, that’s beta software for you!” C’mon, everyone knows that software today is going to be riddled with issues. Are we so naive that we think that Yahoo or Google hasn’t already done some beta testing before releasing things like this to the public?
Oh come on, it’s just like doctors and lawyers referring to their business as a “practice” 🙂
There has undoubtedly been internal alpha testing, and most likely a tightly controlled, private beta round as well before you even hear about these things. For the things you’re mentioning, “beta” really means “public beta,” which translated roughly means “let’s get some monkeys to bash on the code for a while and see what breaks.”
The only problem I have with this is that some services — like many of Google’s — never seem to get beyond public beta.
Scott hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. How else would a developer do it? Is it just a matter of semantics? or the process?
Another factor that I think plays in to this is the newer development methodologies being used today which seem to reduce (or increase, depending on your perspective) the release cycles, thus tossing the project into what would seem like a perpetual beta.