Betatesting is it for you?

A few days back I wrote about how a test cycle for a computer program works. This might leave you thinking if beta testing is for you. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before signing up to a beta test program.

1) Am I willing to invest time into testing somebody elses software?
2) Am I willing to accept unexpected results in the test phase that might bring down my computer or result in data loss?
3) Am I able to describe what I did to make a program crash or behave unexpectedly?
4) Am I willing to give feedback on the things I encounter?

If the answer to these questions is yes, you might be a good beta testing candidate. as you can see, one of the main issues in a beta testing cycle is investing time to actually try the software and the ability to put the things you encounter into words. If you are thinking about participating in a beta test for the first time here are a few keypoints you should put in a good report:

- Which version did you use when the problem occured?
- What happened?
- How did you make it happen?
- Did it happen only once or is it reproduceable?
- Is it a severe problem or a minor glitch?

An example of a useful report could look like this:

Bugreport for yourFancyProgram 0.8 beta 1

yourFancyProgramm 0.8 beta 1 crashes when clicking the impressMe button
After entering some text in the second field from the top without filling in the first and clicking the impressMe button afterwards yourFancyProgram unexpectely quits. This happens everytime I tried this. This is a real showstopper.

Writing something along the lines of

"The program I am testing does not work" surely is well meant, however it does not help narrowing down the cause of the problem.

So what is in for you if you are betatesting stuff?

- You get the chance to give feedback on arising problems early
- You get a shipping product that is reliable and stable
- You get to see the program early and are able to judge if it is for you or not

That´s it for today.

Cya,

Malte