Summersault Blog

A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:

• Pre-alpha: software in this stage is still actively being written, and like anything else that is only half-formed, it is not expected to work or even make sense to anyone except the person(s) building it.
• Alpha: software in this stage is ready for internal review and testing, but is still expected to have bugs and refinements to be addressed.
• Beta: software in this stage is ready for testing and review by people who know they are using a test version of the software, and who are knowledgeable about how best to test to make sure it’s working correctly in all aspects. While bugs and refinements are still possible, the goal for beta software is to have those be minimal.
• Production: software in this stage is ready for use by the public (or whomever the intended user base is), and its expected to have no issues that affect the user experience.

These labels and stages are fairly common within any given sector of software development. Historically, a software developer would rarely consider anything but “production” software to be suitable for use by the public. With the advent of web-based applications that can be deployed, refined, and redeployed quickly and with minimal overhead (no CD-ROMS or diskettes to ship, user manuals to reprint, etc.), that convention is changing. One of the best examples is Google and their industry-changing web services like Gmail and Google Calendar. Both are officially in “beta” (even the graphic at the top of every page says so), and yet people are using these services every day to manage critical functions of their lives (e-mail communications and time scheduling/todo lists, respectively) as if they are “in production.”

So what does it mean to depend on beta-quality software for critical uses? What should you expect from Google and other software providers who openly acknowledge that the software they’re putting out there for you to use isn’t yet production-worthy? In particular:

• What known bugs and problems exist in the software that keep it from being production-worthy?
• What are the chances of data loss (e.g. all of your e-mail disappears), and if data loss does occur, does the software provider intend to try to get it back?
• Are there areas of security and privacy that may not be as fully tested or refined as they will be later, and what concerns should someone using the software have about those issues?

There are obviously many more similar kinds of questions you could ask depending on the particular piece of software (e.g., “is Gmail’s spam filtering mechanism also considered beta, or is it just the software tool as a whole?” or “when Google Calendar comes out of beta, will Google charge for usage of it beyond a certain number of calendars/events/etc?”) But hopefully you can see the point: the label of “beta” software can mean different things in different situations, but it generally always means “not quite ready for production use.” I think it may not be the best thing that prominent software developers are desensitizing users to that fact, and the possible consequences that come with it.

So if you’re using beta software in your life, make sure you know what the liabilities and issues might be. And if you’re looking at software developers to create a web application for you, make sure they know the difference between the different stages of the software life cycle, and why they matter in creating quality.

Tags: applications, Google, software, software engineering, testing

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Desktop Software, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.