Hypothetical Beta

Can Customers Use Your Software?

A predicament often encountered by software development companies is that customers discover they cannot use the product. The answer is external third-party testing.

Every software development project is a system made up of product knowledge, artifact information and team communication. How your development team collaborates in the beta cycle, how you lead your product out of the lab, is critical to filling your order book. The goal is to apply knowledge and information and communicate it to the external pre-release testers. The beta cycle is at the heart of this challenge.

Leverage Customers with R&D and Marketing

All the problems involved in running the beta cycle are answered by
outsourcing the process to ßetaWatch Inc. This service reworks quality
assurance unit scripts and integration tests into a beta test matrix to ensure that feature requirements are tested before release. ßetaWatch's globally based testers look at factors such as functionality, ease of use, documentation, attributes of your marketing and product requirements.

Angel Investment

Recently BetaWatch Inc. encountered a company who thought that testing their product in the lab was good enough. However, after providing a hefty investment, an investor took the release home to test on his own PC and found that it wouldn't install.

We were contracted to run a beta cycle, and found that there were no written product specifications, marketing was not based on experience and quality assurance was negligible. The product did not have a robust user base.

Working through the documentation, we established the required functions and found eager testers through our globally placed beta sites. Our beta service provided a customized test matrix to the testers.

Virtual Network

To ensure synchronous team collaboration, BetaWatch established a virtual network so that bug threshold could be reported and fixes sent to users could be tracked to completion. Regular reports to the members of the escalation team were documented and put onto the secure virtual site. At the end of this period, we had professionally generated test results and observations, along with verification that users can use the software. To view a sample of the first page of our virtual network, please see http://www.betawatch.com/knetwork.

If you want to make sure that your software release does what marketing says it will do, you gain an enormous advantage by running your product through a beta cycle with external testers, providing digital due diligence™.

ßetaWatch Inc. digital due diligence™

ßetaWatch Inc. President and Senior Consultant Temi Grafstein provides
digital due diligence™ for her clients in a wide range of technologies including middleware, virtual private network, customer-relationship management, e-commerce, firewall, knowledge management, transaction switch, point of sale, media convergence, online auction, and storage and retrieval systems.

Intellectual capital is divided into three streams: life cycle, beta cycle and sanity check. Ms. Grafstein developed BetaWatch's strategic methodology for considering the necessary digital due diligence™ required to accelerate revenue growth. For clients, she customizes BetaWatch's proprietary software and system audit tools to provide business lifecycle services.

*	3 day Sanity Check
*	3 day in-house beta knowledge transfer
*	8 - 12 week Beta Process
*	Competitive Intelligence
*	Original Documentation
*	Software Product Forum

 

Next Newsletter Title: How to Reverse the dot.com Slump - Winter 2001 For a proposal tailored to your specific needs, phone 416-780.1677 or e-mail Temi at tgrafstein@betawatch.com