How long is “beta” supposed to last?
Yeah…the term “beta” has been stretched beyond all recognition (especially by Microsoft). Actually, I think Microsoft is less ‘guilty’ of this than other companies, especially Google which still has News in beta. MS does long betas for their operating systems and Office because they need to real world test the largest combination of hardware and other factors you can imagine. Google News is still in beta because they haven’t figured out how to monetize it without raising legal issues but Google Froogle has been in beta as long or longer and that one I’m not really sure why. I think these two instances are the one most responsible for perceptions like Brent’s. FYI, I used to be a product manager and ran betas for three different companies, none of which had cycles that lasted more than three months but all of which could have used a bit more baking.
LairBob, I think MS does get useful information out of the Customer Experience Quality Program, not to mention that I’m pretty sure they use Windows’ phone home utility (the request to send an error report any time an application crashes) extensively. And other collection methods/channels. Google, OTOH, has none of these and frankly I’m not sure how Google News could even be considered a beta except for blocking the potential liability involved.
Umm, hopefully you have a program manager who defined what alpha, beta and RC (or GM) entail. I generally always defined them thusly: Alpha: not feature complete, fully functional or even tested, but “up and running” enough to bang away and play with it. A good time to begin bug reporting. Alpha ends when development has completed coding the features in the spec into a somewhat stable build, with proof the features are at least testable. A good PM won’t allow graduation to beta until this is the case. Beta: Development of features is no longer a consideration. If something didn’t make it into the product at this point, it is cancelled (and removed from all packaging, promotional materials, etc.) and scheduled for the .1 rev. This is the real deal testing period. All features should be tested to the point of bug resolution. If bugs persist in a feature that is critical, it delays release. But it’s dangerous to begin removing features, as they could introduce new bugs; this is supposed t
