{"id":99,"date":"2005-10-11T05:47:32","date_gmt":"2005-10-11T10:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2005-10-11T05:47:32","modified_gmt":"2005-10-11T10:47:32","slug":"too-much-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/2005\/10\/11\/too-much-beta\/","title":{"rendered":"Too much beta?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some friends<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe53l-1B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chuckchat.com\/technorama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}