As ideas for changes to WinTOTAL go from the rough stage to final delivery, they pass through several phases. The two most important are “alpha” and “beta” stage, and you’ll hear us refer to those two stages a lot. This page explains what we’re talking about when we use those terms, and gives you some insight into how our programs are developed and tested.
Alpha versions are very preliminary versions, typically hot off a developer or quality assurance person’s desk, and go to targeted handfuls of ad hoc volunteer users who are most likely to be quick “litmus tests” for the items changed. For example, if an alpha version has a new bug fix, we’ll e-mail the changed pieces to those people who specifically saw that bug and who could replicate it easily (which is often impossible in our labs). Or, if we’re trying out a new button, menu, or screen design, we’ll shoot it to some appraisers first just to get rapid early feedback. An alpha version and the continually changing cadre of alpha testers tells us if we’re “on the right track” before we invest more time and effort into getting it to the “beta” stage.
Beta versions are more robust and heavily tested internally, and sent as a special Instant Customer Update to our permanent roster of hundreds of standing beta testers. Beta testers use the pre-release versions of the software, and nothing else, in their daily work. In Aurora’s case, most beta testers had switched over to Aurora as their full-time appraisal software nearly a year before we shipped it en masse, pumping out hundreds of reports per day among them, in all sorts of environments – some urban, some rural, some technical and some not, some with mobile tools and others purely desktop, a handful from larger offices, but with the vast majority being typical one-man shops. Since there are hundreds of them from nearly every state and situation, they’re a healthy and representative cross-section of all of you.
As they report issues, we fix them, and they give their blessings – or not – before we ship it to everyone in a public Instant Customer Update. That’s what we’re referring to when we say something “is coming out of beta”. It’s graduating to the “live release” stage. Last week, they found some issues which were not easily fixed late in the game, and we agreed to delay the update a week to fix them. It worked out exactly as it should. We put reliability above the deadline, right where you want it. You’ll see the effects of that when you get the update.
But they do more than find problems. They help design the product overall. They send us mockups of screens that they’d like to see. They show us other programs they use and which they think we should emulate. They suggest everything from the names of buttons and menus and such to the steps we should make the program follow. They don’t always agree with each other (in fact, there’s constant debate), but that’s exactly how it should be. Every user approaches every situation uniquely. But we eventually have to choose, and that’s what we do. And therefore not all of them always agree with our decision, and neither do all of you. That’s healthy as long as we listen and try to address the “most likely user”, or MLU, for each individual feature.
Sometimes we remote control their PCs to see firsthand what they’re telling us, and sometimes we fly groups of them into our office, so they can do their work on their laptops right in front of us as we watch. Sometimes we go to them and ride along on inspections, holding the “dumb end of the tape” and seeing how they really work. (What’s the dumb end of a laser device? Holding the reflective target right next to your eye?)
In all of those scenarios and in the non-stop daily interaction with alpha testers and beta testers (we talk to them on the beta user forum and in e-mails, chats, and phone calls literally hundreds of times a day) the program is constantly undergoing improvements and testing. It was like that in Athena, and Olympus, and Apollo before that, and in every other product we sell. There are beta testers for the Vault, for XSites, and so on. We’ve had alpha and beta testers since before the very first DOS TOTAL 1.0 ever hit the streets in 1986.
So, all of our software goes through alpha and beta testing, and is influenced in design and purpose, by people just like you, every single day. They aren’t just “squeaky wheels”. It’s proactive and it’s extensive. But it will never, ever result in software where everyone agrees on the merits of every button, screen, or feature, or where everyone encounters the exact same issues. With a couple of hundred alpha and beta testers, but 50,000 PCs each as unique as a fingerprint running WinTOTAL in the rest of the world, there will be problems seen which never, ever would be revealed in a thousand years of testing.
Being a beta tester is very hard work. They have to run an appraisal practice just like you do, but using software much more “raw”, and with time set aside for communicating at length with us about it. Nevertheless, it’s quite rewarding. Betas emotionally “own” the software just like we do, so they aren’t wallflowers about it – either in public or behind closed doors with us. If being a member of our beta group sounds interesting, just e-mail Adam Calvery at debug@alamode.com.
