Welcome back to our art of beta testing column. Just in case you forgot what the first part was all about, feel free to read it up here:
The art of beta testing-structured beta testing
Completely outsourcing tests is dangerous
Man, your old-style. Having five handhelds at home is stupid! I dont have a single one at home or in my office-Developer of Censored, on ICQ
This impressive person apperently trusts his beta testers even though he does not give them test cases or anything. If he has extremely committed testers, this will work fine. However, if not, goodnight. A beta tester usually is not paid (much) and is a plain user interested in either the new program, getting a serial for free or showing off to his friends that he runs the latest and greatest apps! His interest in your well-beeing is rather low. Exceptions exist-guard them like a treasure, people!
Anyways, a beta tester has a higher probability to overlook things than the original developer has. It doesn’t have to be lack of interest or typing effort, he can also treat this as o.k. as he discovered a workaround.
Anyways, there is an old german proverb saying that control is better than trust. Keeping at least a mid-end box like a Tungsten T or E2 in your labs definitely wont bust your budget-but it would keep you at least theoretically capable to test your software yourself. If you are too lazy to do it though,…
Got something to add?
The art of beta testing-part 2
Hello,
I have a general suggestion: perhaps you would like to post reviews of development tools available for Palm, in terms of productivity, instrumentation, and so on. Which ones do you use?
Thanks for a great blog,
Leo
Hi,
thank you for the feedback.
There is a lot of info about PODS available in the “old” blog-so sorry, but these posts havent been moved here yet.
About SnmallBASIC and OnBoardC: I could do a bit of stuff on these too-if you all are interested and I have the time;).
What development tools would you like to see discussed? Books will be reviewed soon…
Best regards
Tam Hanna
[...] Organization rules! The last two parts tought us that, in case you missed them, find them here: The Art of betatesting-Completely outsourcing tests is dangerous The Art of betatesting-Random testing is useless-structured testing rules Today, we will cover a topic that could easily have been taken from Murphy’s law: the amount of betatesters active is high at two points over time: Registration and Code giveaways! Zombietesters and other troubles Betatesters are like a can of worms. Once opened, the only way to recan them is to use a bigger can. The very same thing happens to many developers. You have an excellent team for version x, and three to six months later, you start betaing version y. An email goes out to the old gang-and you get one reply at best. Where did the testers go to? People tend to forget stuff after some time. Thus, you need to do only one thing to keep them active-keep releasing new betas. Alternatively, you could also follow the approach of the bazaar-users want updates. So, you could dismiss your beta team after initial release-and use registered customers as voluntary testers! This approach pays out, because registered customers usually are interested in the development of the program as they paid for it. As an additional bonus, you can save the licences that you need to give the testers! Any ideas here? Did you ever do a registered user test? [...]