{"id":58,"date":"2005-04-05T07:28:17","date_gmt":"2005-04-05T13:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/public-beta-of-packaged-software-10-steps-for-a-successful-beta-program\/"},"modified":"2005-04-05T07:28:17","modified_gmt":"2005-04-05T13:28:17","slug":"public-beta-of-packaged-software-10-steps-for-a-successful-beta-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/public-beta-of-packaged-software-10-steps-for-a-successful-beta-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Beta of Packaged Software: 10 steps for a successful Beta Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, in a discussion I came across with a ‘How to do a Public Beta of Packaged Software’<\/i> question. What came out was a list of 10 bullet points. Not that I am an expert on this topic or I have successfully ran public beta programs for million (or billion) dollar corporations — I just happened to participate in a few.
\nHere’s how a successful public Beta program should be run (not in any particular order of appearance):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Public Bug Parade<\/b><\/li>\n
  2. Moderated Discussion Forum<\/b><\/li>\n
  3. Moderated Chat amongst Beta Participants<\/b><\/li>\n
  4. Incentives to Bug submitters<\/b><\/li>\n
  5. Build announcements<\/b><\/li>\n
  6. Visible Change Log of Builds<\/b><\/li>\n
  7. Easy Feedback form<\/b><\/li>\n
  8. Incentive for Referrals<\/b><\/li>\n
  9. A certificate or tchochke as a Thank You note to each Beta participant <\/b><\/li>\n
  10. Beta Program should run from a community website (Sales\/Marketing pitch is the last thing Beta-users are interested in)<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Update:<\/b> Gautham proposes the 11th step (The Microsoft way of running a successful Beta Program) — Release the code, make people pay, and then fix the bugs.
    \nNext Part: More details<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Recently, in a discussion I came across with a ‘How to do a Public Beta of Packaged Software’ question. What came out was a list of 10 bullet points. Not that I am an expert on this topic or I have successfully ran public beta programs for million (or billion) dollar corporations — I just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}