It just dawned on me what the deal is......we are not actually beta testers here......Cliff already has beta testers for this stuff.
I think putting this beta up for us to try was more of a "hey, check out this new feature I made...it's what the beta testers are testing" thing,
than it was him wanting a thousand new beta testers. I could be wrong , but it sure might explain why he was upset.
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When I was writing code and testing for big software companies, "beta" was supposed to be feature-complete and mostly focused on finding bugs. We went to specific power users and asked if they'd like to participate in our open-beta and spelled out the requirements.
The Alpha-stage is when features are added and tested for usability, and the software is tested for stability.
Private beta is when they're more likely to encounter errors because the software needed more eyes than the internal test team had. Often we're bouncing between firmware versions multiple times daily, resetting the system and globals, comparing behavior in the releases, tearing apart our usual configurations, and then writing up a summary of the things we did. Occasionally we offer suggestions to improve what's there, but mostly it's about testing. Open-beta happens after private-beta has knocked out the errors found and we've said it looks stable.
The purpose of open-beta is to expose the software to many more eyes, environments and uses than what the private-beta team came up with, but it's still for testing. Feature requests don't belong in beta, they come after the final release, then get weighed and incorporated during the next alpha phase; Beta is supposed to focus on stability because new features or extending them could cause the development process to revert back to the alpha phase.
In large software groups, audits occur and varying from an approved development life-cycle can cause them to fail the audit unless they can show how they're actually implementing the steps informally.
FAS bends the software development life cycle a bit because small teams have very close communication and can get away with it. Unfortunately, people in open-beta have been acting like an unruly mob or wolves feasting on prey. I wouldn't be surprised if the beta process has some changes as a result.
That's why I think Cliff said what he said; People think it's an opportunity to dog-pile the process and wish…demand new things, subverting the actual reason for having open-beta. That behavior, when seen again and again, REALLY wears on developers.
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, but that’s the point- I can control that! I can experiment and really hear what each mic sounds like and use the knobs like part of the instrument. I can sound like a tin of bees if I want! Exactly 7 bees, fed on yellow gum blossoms, in a 71.2% gold tin.
