BETA TESTING COULD BE the best job that you would never want to do. Its both frustrating and fun. It offers no monetary rewards but does provide creative pleasure. It must be done as a self sacrifice (and can sometimes feel like you are being sacrificed).
The most difficult part of any beta cycle is when you are receiving those constant phone calls asking for feedback while the product barely works. You sort of scratch your head wondering if they are looking at the same piece of software that you are. You say to yourself: AGive me something that runs for more than two minutes and I could provide some feedback. Yet they keep calling and calling, and unfortunately thats the longest part.
Software development seems to be taking longer and longer, mostly due to the greater level of sophistication required for todays products to be successful. So where is the pleasure? The only real pleasure comes from knowing that you have had even the smallest part in the outcome of a successful product. That your voice is heard, your opinion is respected and youve had significant input. I would like to think that it is not all ego-driven, but grounded in a love for what you do. It is somewhat of a symbiotic relationship. You are not only helping to develop a product but are also furthering your own knowledge while viewing your craft from a different perspective.
During the final stages of the beta cycle you try to put some real work through this, at best, shaky product. In the early stages of testing, it is good enough to re-do completed projects. However, there comes that time that you have to put it to a real test, to simulate real-world pressures.
The hard part comes when you are sitting in a room full of people and the project takes a different turn than the editor anticipated. The client starts to make requests as you silently wonder if that feature is really working or not.
This illustrates why we could never put timely critical jobs through a test system. You have to pick your jobs carefully; you look for a client who likes to experiment and can tolerate a high degree of pain. Depending on the product under test, this can be a difficult combination to find. The job should also demonstrate a direct need for some type of feature that this new product can do better then all others. This will not only help test the product fairly, but demonstrate to the client the need for this new system.
Understanding that beta testing is not only the ability to feed back information to the developer, but also to help sell the product to the industry and gain market acceptance.
The end of the beta test cycle can feel a little anti-climactic. Hopefully, the product has had a successful roll-out and is now being used in a production environment. The many months and sometimes years you have spent talking up the product are now over. Nobody seems to care that you had the foresight to get involved early and push the product, yourself and your company to the next level when the operator now knows more about the product than you do. Now it is time to search the horizons for the next super product that will change the industry and the way we do work.
Beta (In]site
