Centercode is the leading platform to manage impactful in-the-wild user tests.
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Delta is the next generation of beta testing, leveraging Centercode technology to automate time consuming tasks while increasing user engagement and test results.
What is delta testing and how are tech leaders using it to deliver customer insights throughout agile development? This guide has all the answers.
Advice on running effective, scalable delta testing programs from the Centercode team.
In this episode, Mattel's Paul Chen dives into his past experience at Microsoft with the Surface product launch and demonstrates his passion for developing and designing products to help the next generation explore the wonders of childhood.
Two decades ago, Centercode was bootstrapped by a small group of likeminded founders, collectively driven by our genuine passion to increase the positive impact of technology on the world.
Unlock the magic of beta testing automation and optimize your process as a product manager. Beta test automation can help you streamline your workflows and free up more time for product strategy and innovation.
Centercode's Slack integration delivers real-time beta feedback to one of the most popular messaging apps for business.
We're exploring Google's progressively expanding beta test for Duet AI and their approach to beta testing.
On May the Fourth, discover the do's and don'ts of effective beta test management by embracing the wisdom of the Jedi philosophy while avoiding the pitfalls of the Sith mentality in this specially themed post for Star Wars Day.
In this episode, Jonathan Pardo (Owlchemy Labs, formerly at Sonos) shares insights from his career in music, audio, and technology. He also discusses his time overseeing a community of over 150,000 testers, and highlighted the potential for personal and career growth in QA testing.
Achieving product market fit is crucial for business success. Discover a 4-step process to find and determine product market fit and explore 8 simple ways to test and validate it throughout the development life cycle. By understanding your target customers and validating your product or service, you can drive business growth and stay ahead of the competition.
Discover the pivotal role beta versions play in software development and their impact on the final product. Learn about the importance of beta testing, its place in the software release life cycle, and uncover the differences between alpha and beta versions.
We defined what a product launch blog is, and why it's important. We also provided a step-by-step guide on how to write a product launch blog post, including defining your goals, identifying your target audience, determining your key message, and including social proof.
We outlined the key stages of a successful product launch, emphasizing the importance of planning, execution, and continuous engagement. We shared essential tools, best practices, and strategic insights to guide you through the launch process.
Discover 11 effective ways to gather customer feedback and improve your products and services with this comprehensive guide.
Check out these top 5 tips from Centercode on how to grow your beta program and prove its value to stakeholders. Plus, hear from product testing expert Alex Larsen on the Delta Huddle Podcast.
Have a question about beta testers? This guide will answer the most frequently asked questions about beta testers and about being a tester, while also providing tips and best practices from decades of beta testing experience along the way.
This definitive guide to user acceptance testing (UAT) is a comprehensive resource that covers everything you need to know about planning, conducting, and managing a successful UAT.
Assembling the right management team for a beta is a fundamental step to a successful test. The stakeholder team is responsible for managing and coordinating the beta test, gathering and analyzing feedback from beta testers, and working with the development team to address any issues that are identified.
Discover how world-renowned companies like Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple use beta testing to refine their products and better understand their target audience. Explore four real-world beta testing examples showcasing the power of beta testing to drive innovation and improve the user experience.
A comprehensive guide to launching a successful beta test for startups, including step-by-step instructions, examples, and tips.
Understanding Google Play Store Testing Tracks: Learn about the difference between Internal, Closed, and Open testing.
Learn the essentials of Google Play Store app publishing & maximize your app's success with our expert tips on descriptions, screenshots, & more
With the Diablo IV beta weekends top of mind, we explore the debate surrounding the changing definition of "beta testing" in the gaming industry and the importance of transparency between developers, publishers, and players to rebuild trust and maintain the value of beta testing.
Discover how to create a successful proof of concept for your product idea, including types of POCs, testing methods, and common challenges.
With Alex Larsen as our guest, this episode is all about taking it to the next level. Once you’ve established a program and built momentum, how do you get other teams to see the value in user testing?
Explore the top 8 product management apps of 2023 to optimize collaboration, streamline processes, and make data-driven decisions, all within one comprehensive guide for your product development success.
Discover the six essential components of an effective beta test workspace that fosters tester engagement, streamlines feedback management, and ultimately enhances your product's market readiness.
With reduced resources, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of QA processes is more important than ever. To help you out, here are six best practices for quality assurance that you can use to continue meeting the high standards of your team and your customers even as a team of one.
Learn the key differences and similarities between Quality Assurance (QA) vs Quality Control (QC), and how to implement effective processes to manage quality.
In this episode, Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode along with Technical Trainer, Stefan Stenroos is joined by Richard Ball, formerly Director of Field Testing at Peloton to discuss the best strategies for starting a successful beta program.
Learn how to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of your QA environments with this blog.
Learn how to prioritize beta test feedback using this data-driven method to categorize feedback into four categories: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Would Have. Improve communication, save time and resources, and make better decisions with the MoSCoW Framework.
As a product manager or product management executive, you're always looking for ways to drive better results and improve your products. In your continuous search to improve, have you considered whether you’re leveraging the full potential of beta testing? According to Centercode's 2022 industry report, 7 out of 10 companies say beta testing is the most effective way to improve products.
When reporting on a beta test, it can be challenging to make sense of the data and difficult to know what information to report on or take action on. By following best practices for beta test reporting and using standardized templates, you can ensure that you're gathering the information you need to make informed decisions and improve your product.
It's no secret that customer loyalty is crucial for any business. Not only is it more cost-effective to retain existing customers, but loyal customers also tend to spend more and recommend your company to others.
One way to measure and improve the quality of your products is by tracking relevant product quality metrics during development.
If you want to retain more customers and keep them away from choosing your competitors, it’s essential to keep customer satisfaction high.
By taking the time to properly screen applicants and build a strong recruitment strategy around your test goals, you can not only ensure the success of your beta test, but also maximize the overall value and usefulness of your product.
Effective communication is crucial for the success of any beta test. If you’re stuck or just want some best practices, dive into these tips and examples to help you write the best weekly announcement emails your beta testers have ever read.
By recruiting more applicants than needed, you can increase the response rate, ensure better representation, provide flexibility, and gather extra feedback.
Incentivizing beta testers can not only increase the number of participants, but also the quality and depth of their feedback.
By including brand evangelists in your beta tests, you’re boosting the impact of your projects while strengthening the bonds with your community. But what is a brand evangelist? And how can you recruit them into your tests?
Great beta testers have a combination of personal characteristics and skills that make them effective at testing and providing valuable feedback on a product.
Most companies recognize the value that beta testers bring to an organization before product launch, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The value that lies beneath the water line expands far beyond what you see on the surface.
In this episode of the Delta Huddle podcast, we discuss the importance of building brand evangelism within your user testing programs.
Great beta testers share many of the same commonalities, making them a very valuable part of the product development process. Here is an infographic explaining some of the desirable traits to look for in your beta testers.
Tracking the right metrics while running your beta program is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your beta testing efforts. But what are beta test metrics exactly and why are they important?
By gathering valuable feedback and identifying and fixing issues early on, beta testing can help you improve the user experience and increase the chances of success for your product. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of beta testing and how to conduct a successful beta test.
We'll explore the different types of beta testers, and how each type can provide valuable insights and feedback to help you make improvements and iterate on your products over time.
Not only can beta testing help improve the quality of your product, but it can also provide valuable insights and feedback during the busiest time of the year. In this blog we share tips for planning and executing a successful beta test over the holidays.
Most companies recognize the value that beta testers bring to an organization before product launch, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The mass that lies beneath the water line expands far beyond what you see on the surface.
Your next product launch may be keeping you up at night. With fewer resources, budget cuts, and lack of personnel, it’s going to be much more challenging to release quality products and avoid costly delays.
For our very first episode, we discuss tech optimism, maintaining user delight, and doing more with less when it comes to user testing with David Perry, CEO of Carro and Luke Freiler, CEO of Centercode.
As many teams are now working remotely, it’s challenging to maintain the same level of engagement and productivity that once existed. Remote teams can achieve a thriving remote culture, but it’s going to take some effort to ensure everyone feels aligned and included.
Executive teams invest their hearts and souls into building an environment, a vibe, and a workplace culture that not only attracts new talent, it also keeps employees from looking elsewhere. But, when I say “culture” did you immediately think ping pong tables, sushi chefs, baristas and nap pods?
One of the most important facets of product testing is identifying and finding an audience that will help you make your products better. When planning a product test, perhaps the most vital question to ask when determining who will test your product is, whose feedback will be the most important to your product’s development?
In Spring of 2021, Centercode's biggest release yet was imminent and it was finally time to gather customer feedback. Coincidentally, the release included an entirely new framework, Delta testing, built to capture actionable feedback from testers with minimal effort.
We live in a world where the tools and services we use every day are in a constant state of improvement. Not only do our favorite devices improve massively with each new release, so does the software that powers them.
This week we round out our series on the Centercode Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by discussing testing Delta Impact Score.
There are a couple of big differences between traditional beta testing and delta testing. Perhaps one of the most significant is delta testing’s focus on working within Agile environments (vs. waterfall). Many parts of the delta testing methodology are pulled directly from common forms of Agile development.
That meeting could have been an email… Unfortunately this is a sentiment we’ve all had after a meeting that didn't feel particularly effective.
In my last post, we discussed measuring tester engagement as a part of test health. Today, we are going to discuss measuring product success.
One of the primary concerns of any project manager throughout the testing period is whether there’s enough tester engagement. Good tester engagement is instrumental to a successful delta test.
There are countless benefits to having a successful user testing program. Being able to confidently bring new products to market and mature existing products is where the key business value lies.
If you read Part 1, you already know that the Centercode Delta release is a totally new way to plan and run user tests using automation, intuitive dashboards, and rich user feedback. So let’s dive into some of these features a little deeper.
Have you ever wanted to be able to automate your user tests and just jump to the good part where you get awesome feedback that’s easy to apply to product development? Us too.
The benefits of an awesome, highly effective invite are obvious: it allows you to attract and recruit qualified candidates (like customers or potential customers) for your beta, field, UAT, and user testing projects.
Whether you’ve returned to the office, work in a hybrid model, or your entire company took the leap to being fully remote, our work spaces have changed dramatically in the last two years.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This quote from Atomic Habits, by best-selling author and habit expert James Clear, is as true for using customer insight to drive product decision-making as it is for training to run a marathon, not biting your nails, or remembering to unload the dishwasher every night.
What is continuous user research, exactly? We like this definition from Tomer Sharon, head of user research at Goldman Sachs:
So you want to run a beta program — and we're stoked for you! Whether you got here after running a handful of beta tests on your own, or your boss handed the task over to you, the insights you get from beta testing open the door to an incredibly enriching world of customer knowledge and product insight.
Relationships require care. And not just in the form of those once-in-a-while grand gestures — though an extra special thank you every now and again never hurts.
Imagine you're running a marathon. At first, you're bursting with energy — you've been waiting for this! You feel like you could run forever!
Calculating user testing metrics? Avoid this common mistake and learn how to find the 3 metrics that matter most to showing your impact.
No one knows what your customers need better than your customers; that's why their feedback has never been more critical to the success of your product.
It's the time of year for resolutions: where we dream big about the things we want to do and improvements we want to make in the hopes this year will be better than the last. But as everyone who's two weeks into a diet or exercise routine knows, resolutions are easy to set but difficult to keep — especially when you don't have a system in place for making it happen.
After 2020 and a year defined by upheaval, 2021 has been all about recovery and progress: shedding what doesn't work, strengthening what does, and reimagining possibilities in a world with a new outlook and new demands for the future.
The end of the year can mean a lot of things. While at home it's about decorating, cooking mountains of food, or reuniting with loved ones, the end of the work year is about looking back at everything you've accomplished — and looking forward to what's around the corner.
Should you plan to launch a user testing project over the holidays? In this installment of Ask the Expert, Centercode's Sr. Test Manager Mike Fine talks about the oft-debated holiday test launch: when it works, when it doesn't, and what you should expect from your testers.
Just like there are many ways to collect attitudinal data, there are different moments when data about your customers' thoughts, opinions, and attitudes comes into play during product development. But how do you get this data?
When you think of "incentives" in user testing, the first thing that comes to mind might be a free product or a gift card. And yes, those are both common and viable ways to reward testers for their participation.
Alpha testing is a critical part of getting ready for your product launch. It generally starts when your product is 60% feature-complete: stable enough to work in the real world, but still needs fine-tuning before it's ready for customers.
At some level, you probably already understand segmentation as a concept. But let's talk about how it applies to user testing. In user testing, segmentation means splitting your tester pool into subsets based on certain characteristics.
The first step in building a product that solves problems is understanding what problems exist for your customers and how they're attempting to solve them. Technographics are a critical part of that understanding.
Delta testing is user testing automation. At a tactical level, delta testing means: identifying users from your target market, getting them to use and provide feedback about your product, prioritizing those insights, and turning them into action items for Product and Engineering.
The whole point of automating your user testing processes is to make the hard work of traditional beta faster and easier. But saying "beta is automated now" isn't the only thing that makes delta testing more efficient and effective.
Beta testing has many moving pieces. You need to recruit target market testers with the right demographic and technographic segmentations.
In life, there are challenges you take on because they build character and the end goals are enormously rewarding. Other times, you find yourself mid-challenge because it's something you have to do, whether that's for your role, your product, or your organization.
The market for connected devices and other technology is more competitive today than it's ever been. Companies know that it's not enough to get their product off the shelves.
Beta, field, and user acceptance testing have the same overall goal in mind: to gather real-world feedback and improve products before launch. But while the majority of companies include customer tests, companies relying on traditional user testing practices experience varying degrees of success.
It's easy to find a company that has some sort of dogfooding or employee testing program. But it's much more difficult to find one whose program delivers actionable user insights derived from co-worker product use — unlike those companies using delta testing tools and practices.
Competitive testing is a use case in delta testing that lets you research and test competitors' products with their customers (i.e., your potential customers).
Let's get one thing straight: delta testing does not replace UX or CX. Yes, delta testing, also known as user testing automation, provides exploratory user experience feedback from real-world usage by representatives of your target market demographics. But delta testing's unique deliverables are complements to, not competing with, the work of UX and CX teams.
Delta testing is user testing automation. Like beta, field, UAT, and other fields of user testing, it generates feedback by getting functioning products into the hands of targeted users and giving them time to absorb and adopt the products out in their real-world environments.
In a nutshell, delta testing is automated user testing. It's a proven, cost-effective approach to legacy user testing that allows companies to capture early product feedback from customers throughout the product life cycle.
The key to bubbling up the insights you need from user testing is getting the right users to provide the feedback you need for wherever you are in development. But what does the "right tester" actually mean?
As a product owner, the prospect of bringing a new product to market is exciting. You see a gap in the market for a device, software, or mobile app that will make your customers' lives easier or more enjoyable.
There comes a point when the scale of your user testing projects or program exceeds what standard productivity tools like email and spreadsheets can handle. And that's when it's time for an upgrade: a specialized user testing tool that will serve as a hub for all your test management activities. Awesome!
These quick user testing insights will help you identify which types of tests will deliver actionable, real-world-driven recommendations that increase product success.
Since Centercode was founded back in 2001, we've learned a lot about what goes into becoming a highly skilled and competent user testing professional. Experience is a great teacher after all! What's even better is you don't have to work in the field for 20 years to benefit from our two decades of insights.
Centercode was founded in 2001 as a way to connect technology innovators with their real customers through user testing. In 20 years, technology has changed significantly. But our mission — to remove friction in today's technology by helping companies perfect their products — has stayed the same.
Today, there are thousands of connected tech products on the market — and thousands of mobile apps for managing each one.
By 2022, Gartner predicts that there will be 6.4 billion devices in use next year as smartphones overtake desktop computers.
One of the greatest traits of agile development is that it allows teams to respond to customer desires quickly. Its flexibility and conduciveness to rapid iteration opened the door to product evolution through small, successive improvements.
Investing in product analytics, quality testing, user experience, and market research is absolutely essential to building a good product.