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As you build a product, testing becomes essential for quality purposes and to ensure your product behaves as you want it to.
A product will go through different phases in its lifetime, one, in particular, will reduce the risk of product failure.
Beta testing is a type of user acceptance testing, meaning you try and see if your beta test team actually enjoys and approves your product.
In this context, you give a close to final product to a group of testers that will have to evaluate the performance of your product in real-world tests.
The aim is for them to use it regularly and to provide as much feedback as possible for you to get a good idea of where your product stands and what improvements it needs.
The beta testing phase is already pretty advanced and you should make sure your products fulfill a few requirements before getting into this stage:
The steps following the beta testing phase are crucial to making your product grow and reach even more people.
You might have heard of the term "Alpha testing campaigns". Quite similar to the "Beta testing campaigns", alpha simply refers to a more primitive unstable product with fewer features.
The Alpha phase is often done in-house, in an environment where testers, who are often the product developers know the inner workings of the product.
They might voluntarily exhibit odd behaviors to force particular failures or make sure the product holds up.
While both refer to targeted testing campaigns, beta testers often don't have any information on the internals of the product, their usage won't be as extreme and will resemble what could be normal behavior.
The goal is to collect data on the product's real-world usage.
While anyone designing their product should go through a beta testing phase, our clients include startups & larger businesses with products that need testing by real-world people, we develop their prototypes and go through the various testing phases.
One of the most common uses of beta testing is in the development of mobile apps.
To scale their app and make sure they can handle a large group of app downloads, they collect app engagement data and progressively grow the beta testing team, from a few hundred people to thousands and tens of thousands.
Generally speaking, teams concerned with beta testing are teams developing consumer goods, where distribution should be large scale and where the team needs to ensure high-quality software engineering or product design.
This is also an occasion to test complex video technology or complex technology in general, and a way to gather UX feedback prior to the real release.
Sure, you might be confident in your product's quality and build, but only real-world users can test your product to its fullest.
Good quality beta testing will ensure beta users give you valuable info prior to your release.
Targeted real-world users form a large group of people, the first scaling up that your product is facing, sure it might work well for 10 users, but in the case of a beta app, what happens when a lot more traffic gets to your servers?
For a physical product, what happens when beta testers start throwing your product around, or putting it underwater?
Sometimes, you just haven't tested everything, humans are resourceful and will test your product past whatever boundaries you set for it.
In short, many beta tests will give you meaningful feedback by running real-world tests.
This very helpful tool ensures that you anticipate live production product trouble and maximize customer satisfaction by receiving meaningful feedback.
Don't beta test at your own risk.
A beta test can be either open or closed.
If closed, the team will select a small group of participants and give them a test unit to try out.
This ensures they can spend more time with the testers and grab as much feedback as they can from a single user.
Open betas, on the other hand, don't have any limit for the number of testers.
This means you can spend less time on a single tester.
Some cases can still benefit from open betas, particularly if you want to test your product at scale.
Opening it to the public will simulate much more real-world-like conditions than a closed beta.
This also means your product has to be slightly more developed for an open beta.
As you bring in more users in your beta, your beta gets closer to a real release and loses some of its purposes.
You have to find the right size between scale and quality.
One frequent example is to start with an open beta, once you reach the desired number of testers, you begin to close it off.
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