5 things every beta tester should know

[Ian]

ZDNet have an interesting article on some points that beta testers should know - the juicy bits start on page 2:

Things have changed. According to Thurrott, “The real problem here is that the feature set of Windows 7 was frozen well before the Beta release. So the feedback [Sinofsky] discusses throughout this post is 99 percent bug testing, really (and 1 percent, we hear your concerns but have a million reasons why we can’t change a thing).”

And this is a problem? I don’t think it’s any accident that the two most troublesome releases in the history of Windows also had the longest beta cycles. I was running pre-beta builds of Windows 95 in 1993, nearly two years before it was released. The first alpha releases of Longhorn, which eventually became Windows Vista, were handed out at the PDC in late 2003, nearly three years before Vista shipped.

Read more in this blog post.

 

[Geoffers]

Hmmmm, interesting! I have fed back to MS and to Norton about bugs & issues that I felt they should be aware of. I have to assume that millions of others have done the same as I have not had any response from either of them!
I don't expect a response per se, but feel that when a particular aspect of a program appears not to start/work, there should be some acknowledgement somewhere that it has been noted!

As the guy says, most Beta users provide no feedback whatsoever! Those of us that do are left feeling ignored!

 

[Ian]

As the guy says, most Beta users provide no feedback whatsoever! Those of us that do are left feeling ignored!

Yep, thats the thing - there's no way of tracking what gets done with the feedback we submit. I can understand how that's not practical, but it would be nice to see

 

[Geoffers]

Yup, if there was just a website that summarised reported issues!