What Is TryBeta?
Who is going to use your software? What kind of experience will your users have? Will they read through your entire manual? Does your manual even make sense to your users?
There are lots of questions to consider in software development. The overall goal of software development is to get end users to use your software. As a software developer you’ve probably gotten emails from users along the lines of;
“Your software doesn’t work” or “Your product crashed my computer, fix it”
One of biggest problems in software development is not necessarily that it is impossible to fix all coding bugs, but that potentially millions of people will use your software the way they believe it should be used. They may have grown to expect that certain functionality works a certain way or they may have come from a different operating system where a certain feature worked differently. Your users will no doubt find a way to use your program in a way that you have not thought of before.
TryBeta aims to help you with both of these issues. It will link you up with your actual potential user base to find high quality, reliable beta testers. These users will know your software is in beta stage and will not expect anything more. Pending your approval, these users will actively test and report bugs, usability issues, feature requests and suggestions. You will be provided with real feedback by the very same people who will be using your software.
In order to find quality beta testers, TryBeta provides a two way feedback system between beta testers and developers. Without giving to much away, developers will easily be able to get a good idea about how testers have performed in the past.
TryBeta is targeted towards the small company and independent software vendor. It provides them with the resources to conduct their beta program with the added security of knowing they are getting reliable beta testers.
The beta process is not just about testing your code. It’s also about testing the viability of your product in the market. This is what TryBeta helps do for the software developer.
Integrity and security of the web site is very important to us. If you don’t want your product released to all beta testers on the web site, you don’t have to. We have included features in the web site which allow you to control how public you would like to make your software.
Some developers have asked how beta testers will be attracted to the web site. I’ll save what we’re going to do for beta testers for the next post…