Half-listening to a recent episode of TalkCrunch on my commute to work today, there was a brief discussion about 35-40 mins in to the podcast that the web 2.0 way was not to release beta software in the sense of 'feature complete, but potentially buggy' code, but instead to release early and often, function incomplete but useable applications, and then work towards feature completion during the beta phase.
So is this really beta testing? Or should we coin a new variant designation? Next in the alphabet is gamma, I think, then delta.
Delta's interesting - in many sciences it refers to a small change in quantity (so perhaps this is a release phase with regular 0.0.1 version increments?).
But this breaks the alphabetic progression. So how's about redesignating the web 2.0 style beta as a gamma release, where the users might expect stability in operation, but potentially regular and even significant feature upgrades?
Then when the app comes out of gamma, it can go into a period of delta progression, tiny tweaks and fixes until the next round of private alpha, limited beta and then public gamma releases that will culminate in the next version up, 'stable delta' release?
(I'm not computer software engineer, so perhaops gamma and delta releases are already recognised?)
Posted by ajh59 at May 19, 2006 12:11 AMI just read your post and... you may already know but Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) is now in Gamma (http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/05/alpha_beta_gamm.html). Web2.0 apparently also introduces a change in the way applications are documented; the post suggest a go-see-for-yourself attitude and documentation also usually tries to be funny. Both may indicate that the user is not considered as hopeless as before, which is good :-)
Posted by: Vlad Tanasescu at May 24, 2006 04:48 PM