Beta Testing Explained
It's a best practice to get customer feedback before releasing products to end-users. In this hyper-competitive era, we need to ensure what we're releasing is the best it can be. This can be done by implementing beta tests, which allow your most engaged customers to share their thoughts and opinions about the product before it is released to all your users.
What Is The Purpose Of Beta Testing?
Beta testing is a method of testing to get an honest, accurate overview of how your software product is working with real users. Using a beta version provides an in-depth look at the experience of the final code with end-user beta testers before you release your final product while also helping you discover any issues and edge cases before the final release.
The use of a product varies, depending on who is using it. Marketing managers focus on what the target market thinks of the product. Common users, on the other hand, focus on how easy it is to use and technical users tend to focus on install and uninstallation. But the end user's actual perception is why they need this product. They know exactly how to use it and what it is for. Beta testing will show you how real customers use your product.
Your product needs to work in the real world, not just in a test environment. In order to create a good experience for customers on many different devices and platforms, you must test compatibility and receive customer validation. This is a crucial step in the development process so that the product works well for a wide variety of people. This testing process ensures compatibility is great for a wide variety of devices and platforms while gaining valuable feedback from users before sending out your final release version.
Let's say a few specific platforms are not compatible with the product because of showstopper bugs that were missed during the product's QA process. Beta testing helps in improvising/fixing the product to be compatible with all platforms. A beta program will help you catch these bugs before the product is available for all users.
Problems that are known to the product management and development team can be troubling for customers. If the customer encounters the same problem, it can be difficult for them to use the product. Testing of these known issues is important because it helps us to analyze the impact of these problems on the entire customer experience.
Issues With Using Traditional Betas
Traditional beta tests can take weeks or months to gather customer opt-ins, and they also require the use of beta keys (ex. for early access to games). Getting feedback from focus groups is often time-consuming and expensive, which lengthens the release process.
Beta’s are a great way to test new features and get feedback and suggestions from customers who are early adopters. If a customer opts into the beta and doesn't like it, you want to be able to switch them back to the production version or make a change to your new product. It's very hard to target specific audiences with traditional betas or do incremental percentage rollouts of new features.