Jeff Voegel: Beta Testers - Getting Them, Keeping Them

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/08/beta-testers-getting-them-keeping-them.html

by ChrisXYZ • 17 years ago

9 3 17 years ago

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

frosty• 17 years ago

this might work for games but for boring things like enterprise software domain, whats the ideal way to find testers and how much should i pay them?

have any of tried out on freelance or amazon turk etc?

dflock• 17 years ago

It sounds like a lot of this advice would work well for non-games software too. I would imagine that it will be harder to get testers initially, but once you do, the rest of the advice sounds very cogent.

mgenzel• 17 years ago

A few points:

a) by asking people to sign an NDA before beta testing, you're slamming a door in the face of the overwhelming majority of potential testers. If you want to ensure a purely CYA legal policy, just stick in TOS as they sign in to test (that won't turn off most since most don't read TOS)

b) while it's true that you are unlikely to find someone who'll look, test out everything, and summarize in constructive bullet points, it's missing the point a bit. Your ultimate goal should be to find large number of warm bodies (ideally, from target audience) to throw at your app and then have infrastructure & discipline in place to observe them and make inferences. Also I think we need to differentiate between alpha and beta testing, they require different approaches (and I suspect that the author is talking about what I would call alpha: pre-functional still secretive app).

Jeff Voegel: Beta Testers - Getting Them, Keeping Them

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