To Beta or Not To Beta

April 2005 - BEK Best Practices Newsletter

How many times have you been pushed for time in your development cycle? Development is running late, time to market is crucial, you’ve already shortened your quality testing process; can you cut or eliminate your beta process? Some companies decide that beta testing is not valuable. The reasons for this include time to market, not having the internal resources available to conduct a proper beta test, and in many cases, companies have a hard time finding customers that are willing to test beta products. The question of whether you do or do not conduct beta testing is critical and should get buy-in from your product planning committee and any other key stakeholders.

Can You Afford to Not Beta Test?

Many believe that if they skip the beta testing step in their development process they will save time and get their product into the market sooner. But what is the cost if lack of information delivers a defective product to the market?

• Development resources get pulled off other projects to do sustaining work, in a crisis mode, in order to re-engineer a quality product
• The product may have a reputation as being poor in quality which will take time and dollars to overcome
• Satisfaction issues become prevalent and require significant efforts to win back customer trust and loyalty

How to Decide

Here are a few questions to ask that will help you determine if you should beta or not.

• How solid are your internal testing processes (component, system level, and alpha testing)? Do they delve deep enough into the product? Do they test from an end user’s perspective?
• Do you know enough about your end users and how they will actually use the product? Do you have “real” data vs. demo data that reflect a wide range of use cases?
• Do you have enough internal resources available to properly manage beta sites? Do you have customers that are willing to be beta candidates?
• If you don’t beta test and significant defects are found after the product has shipped, what is the effect on customers and on the company? Are the implications so minimal that you can afford to skip beta or are they far reaching enough that they justify the viability of beta testing?

These are all key questions to consider. For new products, you may decide to run a beta test with the first few releases to ensure that the product is in line with market requirements. As the product gets more mature, it may not make as much sense to do full blown beta tests. Companies that produce enterprise-class software, as opposed to personal-use products, work closely with a handful of customers throughout the development process. Perhaps these customers can help do a modified or full-blown beta test. The more you involve customers during your development process, the more likely it is that your beta process will go smoother.

The goal for everyone is to deliver a high quality product to the market in as short a time frame as possible. While your product will never be 100% perfect (and it shouldn’t be), you do want high quality in order to maintain customer relationships, manage support costs, and keep your new product development resources focused on creating new and exciting products--not sustaining existing ones.

We’d love to hear about your experiences with beta testing. You can email these and other comments to .

Jim Kissane is a partner with RSViP Inc, which enables growth-focused business owners, through professional assistance and access to new sources of capital. He can be reached at JimK@RSViP.com.

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