Modern Primer on Alpha and Beta Releases, Technical Product Development is Never Complete
I was searching “Alpha Release Lifecycle” in order to find pre-canned content to pass along to a product owner struggling with restrictive release cycles.
The context, and questioning, around product development releases shouldn’t be addressed in forums centered on technical solutions. Tech culture and approach answers aren’t as adaptive as the purpose for perpetual change in business product management.
Thus it’s probably not good that a top search result hit was a StackOverflow link. There, the question isn’t flagged/disabled, and has a decent amount of upvotes between itself and the existing answers — it’s good to acknowledge that the answers may be correct in context of older Business-IT organizational systems, but times change.
Similarly, the technical testing orientation of Wikipedia’s Article isn’t great— permalink here. Wikipedia’s definition for “perpetual beta,” is cool but makes more sense as “perpetual alpha.” Otherwise, yes… software testing strategy is important, but I caveat what that in terms of product release phases near the end of my answer to:
What is the difference between alpha and beta release?
this is a copy/paste of my answer on stackoverflow.com
Existing answers could be correct depending on the product/business environment, and are specifically correct in context of older Business-IT systematics. I provide further thoughts on why I don’t like them at the bottom of my answer.
Alpha and Beta Release Purpose
In any case, your minimum viable- product, feature, or feature group is incomplete; however, you need tangible understanding of what’s really needed in an effective production release that establishes trust with your production users , and if early product/feature designs will be valuable there or if you need to adjust, add, or remove things beforehand.
You “Pilot” through these type of releases. The timelines are irrelevant earlier on, until you’re ready to commit to production after late alpha and early beta phases. You fail fast, and try again if things don’t work out.
“Application”, “Product”, “Technology”, “Prototype”, “whatever” should be considered the same. This is a business process, not a technology process.
Alpha Releases may mean a flagged feature is released for a small, or selectively-large, group of users. Releasing this feature usually means zero documentation or training for users- which you ultimately hope a quality user experience doesn’t require much of, and that an Alpha feature fits right in where it’s intended, is self-explainable, and be well received with sentiment such as“ah, yes, I like this, I needed this!” The point is that these early users can provide relevant and user centric QA within the actual scope of an application’s utility.
- Alpha releases are important, and should be a part of early design testing phases — UI design is never truly operating in context of the actual application’s utility. You don’t want to realize design flaws in production. Fail fast.
- It’s also good to enable user/stakeholder audiences who are interested in progressive application enhancements, in addition to early feedback from these groups in isolated testing. You expect their perspectives to provide a narrow focus on helping you improve the eventual UX vs meeting their expectations of production UX.
- There should be flexibility/agility in the release timeline, and without hard dates to hit Beta Releases.
Beta Releases should be used for the same reasons as above, with additional sought outcomes as the Beta Release timeline progresses. In context to the Alpha Release, here you should iteratively provide for more broad usage, with disclaimers in terms of use, clear feature toggling, and/or with invite-only or signup-only access for larger user groups. Unlike Alpha Releases, the Beta Release allows your product team to consider expanded perspectives for active feedback, passive UX analytics gathering, as well as live performance monitoring of scaled-up application usage.
- As you progress, so does the stabilization, and QA, of the product/feature itself. You’re addressing edge cases & defects as you wrap things up.
- Final production release planning, documentation, training, SLAs, future roadmapping, and budget/business value decisions etc. are finalized here.
—
I don’t agree with the existing answers’ implicit incompleteness objectives associated to some timeline in software/tech product development… maybe if we were stagnant robot beings living in a precisely executed and static world.
I still disagree even if money/resources can dictate tech restrictions, in which case the existing answers are either:
- not applicable: you’re in a critical mission operation (e.g., societal infrastructure) or
- outdated/ineffective business-IT strategy: your business model sucks — e.g. limited in timeline scope with capped waterfall budgets (why are you trying to enhance products with inadequate release phases in waterfall?)… Or you’re operating in the exploitive nature of professional Agile delivery iteration process vs agility in being modeled to adapt… Or even your business model enables freedom through previous success — so you buy 100 high-quality teams expected to build more success in the prior poor ways of working (good luck).
“Testing matters”
- Technical testing needs to be more agile, less about restrictions, and more about better engineering foundations upfront (tests on bad code are lock-in traps for product development).
- Binding release timelines with testing is a messy recipe for sustainment. There needs to be less nuance in IT comfort in technical culture and governance… more about alignment to continuous value release. “I care about this product being effective in its purpose more than I care about 80% test coverage by this date.”
- With some novel tech, you have very few real test cases.
