The primary goal is to improve the success of the upcoming release by providing recommendations for product improvement and a full perspective of customer experience. The aim is to identify and fix critical/important issues, and suggest user experience improvements that are achievable before launching the product. When taken back to the development team, the feedback from actual users is a strong catalyst for product success-and can provide much more value to all of your customers.īeta testers should expect a feature-complete product that may have some bugs, few crashes, and a nearly complete set of documentation. That’s because these testers often provide considerably more objectivity and important product usage insights. As much as possible, it’s important to involve external, independent users that are potential commercial users of the product. Key participants in beta testing can include product managers, sales staff, user experience (UX) staff, and quality managers. Also, beta testing is as an in-depth tour of new or different product features to get a clear and precise response on how well the customer will approve of the updated product. The beta testing process assesses how well the product meets customer expectations and evaluates the extent that the product is ready for release. Beta testing: Customer validation ISN’T optional Beta testing is also evolving, as we explain in the next section. However, they are two distinct and highly important stages of product development.
These two concepts are often interchangeable. Sometimes, there is confusion over the distinction between alpha and beta testing. But the real gems of external testing can be found in the feedback from actual customers, who use the actual product in real-world environments. Yes, beta testing is driven by clear, definitive processes and objectives. The aim is to steadily increase the probability that the product launch will be a great success-in the eyes of your customers. Beta testing builds on the findings of alpha testing, and continuous improvement follows beta testing.
Product testing has at least three stages: alpha, beta, and continuous improvement. In this article, we look at the essence of beta testing, beta testing in agile teams, beta testing best practices, and the future of beta testing automation. Beta testing-together with alpha testing and additional field testing-can significantly improve user experience by identifying subtle and otherwise hidden usage inhibitors hat internal teams overlook. This feedback can help to refine the product prior to final release. In many cases, beta testing also generates unexpected feedback concerning user experience, product quality, and interoperability. There are many benefits in performing open-format, customer-facing product tests because they typically extend outward to provide the broadest coverage. It’s known by other names: customer acceptance testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), customer validation and field testing (as is common in Europe)-but the basic approach is largely the same.īeta testing has great value-if only because it is done with a view that looks out from the development team into the wild.
Though it is often undervalued or even ignored, beta testing is a very crucial phase of software development. Lamentably, beta testing often is neglected or short-circuited in the product development cycle. Without question, this certainly applies to software development. Box once wrote once, “Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.“ Years ago, the great statistician George E.