You Are the Alpha Tester

The software development life cycle, as well as the hardware product life cycle, is getting shorter and shorter. The GE 90-70 Series PLC had a good 30-year run before it became officially obsolete, but that kind of phenomenon is non-existent today. From consumer products to industrial products, customers are upgrading and replacing systems more and more frequently. This shift in the marketplace has changed the nature of how products are developed and tested.

The economics of conventional alpha and beta testing simply do not work any longer. Back in the days when OEM’s could engineer a component and know that they’d be able to continue selling it for 10 years or more, it made sense to rigorously test that system and create a solid, robust foundation before hitting the marketplace. A bad product release under those conditions could cost a company a huge amount of market share and revenue opportunity for years. But today, the opposite is true. Being slow to release a product is the fatal mistake in the marketplace of the twenty-first century. By the time you’ve done alpha and beta testing the old way, the market will have already moved on to the next thing.

What does this mean to you, as the end user? It means, quite simply, that you are the alpha tester. That’s not going to change. You can expect that when you buy new software products, they will have undergone minimal testing. In fact, you will be one of the guinea pigs. That’s not an entirely bad thing. Software systems are moving to the cloud, allowing for continual updates, live feedback, and fluidity of user experience. Instead of buying a CD-ROM at the store and running an installer program, you simply are assigned a login and password. Some software products don’t even require you to install anything. If they do, it is delivered via download with no physical exchange of product. Why is this significant? It allows software companies to make changes on the fly without having to disrupt your use of their products.

This phenomenon isn’t really all that new. Unix-based operating systems have been this way for decades.  In fact, that’s how they’ve been able to stick around. Unix originally was an operating system for engineers and geeks only. The community was able to provide a strong testing environment that made open-source development feasible. Rather than simulating a set of conditions or having paid users go through a series of pre-determined interaction sequences, the Unix community simply put the code into its real operating and environment and found bugs quickly. Since the user community consisted of expert users, each user could find and fix a programming bug rather than waiting for a single company to release a fix. The Unix model doesn’t work for everything, but it’s one example of how being an end user while alpha testing a product is not a bad thing.

As new technologies continue to roll out, formalized testing is likely to disappear altogether for many product types. Expect to be the one who finds the bug more often.

Tags: development, software, technology, testing

This entry was posted on September 12th, 2013 and is filed under General, Technology. Both comments and pings are currently closed.