Welcome to the Centercode Delta Testing Blog

CEO Luke Freiler announces Centercode Partners, a new program for resellers and MSPs to enhance user testing for clients.

Most Recent Posts

Going Beyond Beta: 4 Ways to Leverage Your Community

Building a beta program can have an immense impact on the success of your product and the financial stability of your company. But the things that make beta testing valuable (gathering customer feedback, having a community of enthusiastic early adopters, being able to test in real-world environments) can be valuable for goals far beyond beta. […]

5 Ways Beta Testing Impacts Your Bottom Line

Beta testing plays an integral role in the development and success of any technology product. It can be difficult, however, to pinpoint and quantify exactly how your beta program is impacting your company’s finances. You may have a feeling that beta improves the quality of your product and the success of its launch, but it […]

Using Bug Reports in Centercode

Recently we talked about how bug reports are used in beta testing to further quality and support goals. That post looked at what makes bug reports challenging to collect and how you can ensure you’re getting the data your team needs to fix those critical bugs that seem to pop up during most beta tests. […]

Our Most Popular Beta Management Resources of 2013

We add a lot of new resources to our library and our blog throughout the year. Over time, some rise to the top, so we’ve put together the winners from 2013. If you’re new to our site (or just looking for the best advice we’ve shared so far) these popular pieces would be a great […]

The Ins and Outs of Shipping Beta Units Internationally

This week a beta manager emailed us for advice on shipping hardware beta units internationally. As the head of Centercode’s Managed Betas Team, I’ve been shipping hardware beta units overseas for more than two decades and am very versed in the rules, processes and best practices for making this smooth and successful. Given the complexity […]

Stress Testing: Two Cautionary Tales

Stress testing (also known as load testing) is one of the popular goals in prerelease testing. Yet as recent media kerfuffles with product launches such as Healthcare.gov and SimCity have shown us, they can be risky and damaging endeavors if not handled correctly. So let’s take a look at how stress testing can be done […]

Bug Reports in Beta Testing

Bug reports are the first thing that comes to mind when many people think about beta testing, and for good reason. Since beta tests are all about improving product quality, almost all betas involve collecting bug reports to give to their development and quality teams. Even if your beta test isn’t focused on collecting detailed […]

6 Goals of Public Beta Tests

Planning a public beta test starts with deciding what you want your beta to achieve. Like private beta tests, public betas can be designed with a wide variety of objectives in mind. How you approach your public beta test will very much depend on your primary and secondary goals, since your goals effect everything from […]

The Power of Thank You Notes

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we’re tackling an important (and too often overlooked) part of beta testing: sending thank you notes to your testers. While rewarding your testers with products or gift cards is an integral piece of beta testing, adding a thank you note from your team sends a strong message to your testers. […]

Feature Requests in Centercode

Recently we did a post on the role feature requests play in beta. That post looked at the challenges and benefits of collecting feature requests and is a great overview of feature requests as a concept in beta. This post looks at how feature requests are used in the Centercode beta test management platform to […]

New Resource: Beta Test Management Glossary

Beta testing has a lot of terminology. Those familiar with beta throw around terms like beta applicant, feedback loop, and test platform because we use these terms every day. However, it’s important to make sure that for members of your team that don’t manage betas day-in and day-out, there’s an agreed upon set of terms […]

How Is It Possible to Guarantee 100% Participation?

The single biggest challenge of nearly every beta test is participant engagement. Typical beta tests have very low participation rates (20-30%), meaning over 2/3 of the testers simply walk away with the product or gift at the end without giving any feedback. As part of our Managed Beta Tests, we promise our clients that they’ll […]

Public Betas as a Launch Tool

We’re going to delve into the differences between public and private beta tests to clear up some of the misconceptions and help you devise a beta strategy that makes the most sense for your product. We’ve also written a free whitepaper that walks you through planning a successful public beta test. For now, let’s start with the basics.

Feature Requests in Beta Testing

Beta testing has many different moving parts. With so many pieces, it can be difficult to keep everything in perspective. We’re putting together a series that looks at the roles of different activities and functions in beta testing, so you can make the most of everything beta has to offer. This first post will look at the important, but often misunderstood, role feature requests play in beta.

Using Beta for Competitive Research

Beta testing can be a great tool for understanding how your customers interact with your product, but the usefulness of beta testing doesn’t have to stop there. You can also use your beta community, tools, and expertise to conduct competitive research on other products in your market. This is an easy way to get an in-depth view of how customers use your competitor’s product and how it stacks up against your own.

Centercode Feature Spotlight: Test Platforms

No technology product operates in a vacuum these days. No matter what type of product you’re developing, your product requires some other piece of technology to function properly. Understanding your testers’ environments and how your product behaves in them is fundamental to a beta test. If you’re testing a mobile app, you need to know […]

We’re Visiting On Product Management

We’re a guest author today on the On Product Management blog. Our post takes a look at how to know when you’re ready for beta and includes checklists to help determine product, team, and tester readiness. Big thank you to the On Product Management team for letting us visit! Check out the post now!

Should I Pay My Beta Testers?

As a beta manager you want to get as much relevant feedback from each tester as you can. Incentivizing and rewarding testers for their participation is a key part of getting that feedback. As a result, it can be tempting to attach a dollar amount to specific types of feedback, giving testers cash for each critical bug or for completing all of your requirements.

Keep Testers Engaged with These 10 Beta Activities

There’s a wide variety of activities your beta testers are more than willing to do to help improve your product. The activities that make the most sense for your test will vary based on your product and objectives, but here are ten of the most common ones (spoiler alert: bug reports are just the tip of the iceberg!).

What’s the Difference Between an NDA and a BPA in Product Testing?

The legal aspects of a beta test can be a major stumbling block for any team. When you’re putting prerelease products into the hands of strangers, you want to make sure you have your bases covered. While your legal team may have boilerplate contracts for many situations, this could be their first time dealing with beta’s unique legal questions. Two legal agreements are commonly used in beta: non-disclosure agreements and beta participant agreements. We’d like to take a moment to look at the different purposes these two documents serve.

Insider Tips from Centercode’s Support Team

Reading through this blog, you might be looking for advice on your next beta, or perhaps debating whether to run a beta at all. You could be neck-deep in five projects, or speeding through our training materials preparing for your first. No matter your scenario, there are some simple (yet critical) concepts that directly influence your ability to run a successful test.

The Role of Friction in Beta Testing

One topic we often discuss is how to keep your testers engaged and participating in your beta test. It’s one of the biggest challenges of beta testing and also one of the most complex problems to fix. We’ve come up with a way of looking at beta test participation that might be helpful as you strive to get the most out of your volunteers.

What Constitutes “Participation” in a Beta Test?

We’ve made the claim that our managed beta tests achieve an average active participation rate of over 90%, something almost unheard of in beta testing (where participation rates average ~30%). While in the past we’ve covered many of the tactics and tools we’ve used to reach this level, we’ve never published a definition of exactly what this benchmark is.

10 Mistakes That Will Derail Your Beta Test

Whether you’re managing your first beta or your fiftieth, some mistakes can completely hamstring a beta test. Here are the biggest mistakes to watch out for as you prepare for your next test.

Increasing Participation Through Daily Journals

Getting your testers to consistently provide relevant feedback throughout your test can be one of the biggest challenges of beta testing. One of the ways you can keep testers engaged is by encouraging them to log in to the beta site every day.

Top 5 Challenges Beta Managers Face

Running a beta test can be a great opportunity to interact with real customers as they use your product for the first time, but it can also be a difficult and even painful experience. Every day we talk with tech companies about the frustrations of running beta tests. After a while, we noticed a pattern in what beta managers were telling us. So we gathered up the top five challenges of beta testing, along with some tips you can use to combat them.

7 Keys to a Successful (and Sane) Beta Test

Running a great beta test isn’t easy. The timing is terrible, resources are often limited, and it involves getting a bunch of customers to use a buggy product. All of this can test your sanity during an already intense time. We put together a couple quick tips that can help you keep your sanity while getting the most of your test.

Embarcadero Creates Unified Program Using Centercode

Many beta testing processes are born out of necessity. Your team needs to run a beta test, so you pull together a combination of tools, spreadsheets, and emails to get it done. As your company and beta program grows, however, this approach can become confusing for your customers, who are trying to remember multiple logins, URLs, and processes.

10 Ways to Increase Beta Test Confidentiality

Most product launch preparations are conducted in complete secrecy, and putting your unreleased product into the hands of beta testers during that time can be very scary. Thankfully, there are a number of simple best practices that can significantly increase the security of any beta test, without requiring a ton of effort.

How Cisco Leverages the Centercode Platform

Testing B2B products is particularly challenging. You may have a small number of customer sites testing your product, but each site could have many people providing feedback or be testing multiple products at the same time. If you’re trying to keep track of all that feedback using email and spreadsheets, data will end up falling through the cracks.

6 Tips for Rewarding Your Testers

Well troops, we’ve made it to the end of our Beta Tips series. This final post is dedicated to showing appreciation for your hardworking testers. Giving out a reward after your test is great way to increase participation during your current beta, as well as lay the foundation for future successful tests. Here are some tips to help you say thank you to your amazing testers.

New eBook for Product Managers

Beta testing is often dumped on the plate of an already busy product manager during the hectic weeks before a product launch. To make matters worse, companies rarely have the tools and processes in place to run an effective beta test. As a result, beta ends up feeling more like a necessary evil that needs to get checked off of the list, rather than a valuable contribution to product development.

4 Tips for Closing Your Test

We’re in the home stretch of our Beta Tips series. At this point you’ve collected all the feedback you need from your testers and you’re ready to end your test. But you can’t just shut down your project out of the blue, or you risk confusing your testers and leaving some loose ends behind. Here are some tips for wrapping up your project while laying the groundwork for future tests.

5 Tips for Incorporating Other Teams

No man is an island. Even if you’re running a beta test on your own, chances are that other departments (such as development, quality assurance, marketing, or sales) are involved in some way. How you engage with other teams during and after your beta can be a great way to illustrate the value of beta within your organization. It can also be completely overwhelming. These tips can help you incorporate other teams to run better betas.

Unveiling Our New Purchasing Resources Library

Many of you are familiar with our Beta Resource Library, where we publish detailed content on beta testing best practices. Well, we also have a ton of resources on Centercode’s software and service offerings. So we’ve put together a resource library specifically aimed at helping people determine whether we are the right fit for them.

New eBook: Keeping Beta Tests Confidential

Product launches are often shrouded in secrecy, with a focus on making a big splash when the product is launched. Teams often devote months (if not years) to developing a new product, and as you get closer to the release, you get more and more nervous about confidential product details going public. In those final weeks, putting your product into the hands of a group of complete strangers for a beta test can feel like a huge risk. What if someone finds out about the bugs we uncover? What if a beta tester tells the press about the product? Or worse, gives it to my competitor?

4 Tips for Dealing with Scheduling

In beta testing, your schedule can be a moving target. One little slip can throw your whole beta plan off track, leaving you with a pool of anxious beta testers and looming deadlines. In this installment of the Beta Tips series, we’ve put together some tips for managing beta schedules and delays.

Case Study on the Realization of Basketball Dreams

The team at Future Stars Gaming has been working hard on their suite of Facebook games for nearly two years. Before they launched, however, they wanted validation that their first game, Basketball Dreams, had everything their players wanted. With this in mind, they came to Centercode’s Managed Betas team. The result was a flood of objective, constructive feedback that helped the FSG team improve and launch their game with confidence.

6 Tips for Handling Feedback

For this installment in our Beta Tips series, we’ll be looking at best practices for handling feedback. The rush of information you receive during your beta can feel overwhelming. These tips will help you manage it in a way that gets you the data you need while keeping your testers engaged and focused.

6 Ways to Keep Your Emails out of the Spam Folder

Being able to communicate with your testers is a big part of any beta test. From recruiting, to selection, to thanking them at the end, you want to make sure that your emails are getting through. Otherwise, you run the risk of your testers missing out on important information as your emails languish in spam, and you get more frustrated with their lack of response.

New Case Study on Mobile Startup Slice

The Slice team was busy putting the final touches on their photo-sharing mobile app and didn’t have the time, experience, or internal resources to run a traditional beta test. They had given the app to friends and family to try out, but simply weren’t getting the feedback they needed to perfect their app before launch.

11 Tips for Maintaining Participation

We’re continuing our Beta Tips series with a crucial topic: maintaining tester participation during your beta test. Many beta tests suffer from dropping participation after the initial excitement of the beta test wears off. Below are some of our favorite tips on how to keep testers engaged with the product and providing feedback.

Centercode 2013 Managed Beta Refresh

We’ve been providing managed beta tests as a service to companies of all sizes for more than 10 years now. We’ve managed tests for countless product categories, from mobile apps and massively multiplayer games, to next-gen thermostats and enterprise hardware. At this point I think it’s safe to say that we’ve managed a wider variety of beta tests than any company, ever.

13 Tips for Communicating with Testers

How you communicate with your testers has a huge impact on the success of your beta. If you don’t communicate clearly or often enough you risk alienating or confusing your testers. On the other hand, if you communicate too much you could frustrate testers with your constant micromanaging. Both scenarios depress tester participation and limit feedback. We’ve put together some tips to help you find a balance as you communicate with your testers, and some of the tips aren’t what you’d expect!

9 Tips for Assigning Tester Activities

Once your beta test is rolling, you’ll need to focus on getting your testers interacting with your product. Here are some tips to help you build momentum and get your testers pointed in the right direction.

4 Tips for Kicking Off Your Beta

At this point in the beta process, you’ve planned your beta, recruited applicants, selected testers, and handled the legal paperwork. Now that all your preparations are complete, it’s time to actually start the beta test!

Centercode Partners with Idealab

We’re excited to be launching another partnership with a renowned startup incubator. This time, we’re partnering with Pasadena-based Idealab, to provide beta testing support for their burgeoning companies.

Come See Us at ProductCamp!

Events

Centercode will be a sponsor for ProductCamp SoCal 2012. This year’s “unconference” will be taking place on Saturday, November 3rd at Cal State Fullerton.

Is My Team Ready for Beta Testing?

After making sure your product and testers are ready for beta, the final piece of our beta readiness puzzle is making sure that your own team is ready. We’ve put together a checklist you can use to make sure that others in your organization are prepared to help run a successful beta.

Are My Testers Ready for Beta Testing?

As a follow-up to our product readiness checklist, we put together a list to help prepare your testers for beta. You put a lot of time into planning your beta test and recruiting great testers. With all of the moving pieces involved, it can be tough to keep track of everything you need to communicate to your testers before the test starts. Here’s a list of a tasks that need to be completed to prepare your testers for success.

5 Tips for Handling NDAs and Legal Agreements

Our fourth beta tips post looks at how to distribute and manage the legal documents associated with a beta test, namely non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and beta participation agreements (BPAs). For a more in-depth explanation of these documents, download our free beta test agreement kit.

Avoiding Survey Hell

This is a guest post contribution by James McKey, a beta program manager at Symantec and longtime user of the Centercode platform. In this post, James goes into the pitfalls of beta surveys, including how to use Centercode to give your testers the best survey experience. — Emily @ Centercode We’ve all suffered through survey […]

Is My Software Product Ready for Beta Testing?

One question we’re often asked is: How do I know if my product is ready for beta testing? It’s a fair question. QA and beta teams are often pressured to get new products through beta and out the door as quickly as possible, but if a product goes into beta too early it can defeat the purpose of running a beta test. So we’ve created a quick checklist you can use to gauge if your product is ready for beta.

10 Tips for Selecting Great Testers

For our third installment of the Beta Tips series we’re covering tester selection. At this point you’ve planned your beta test and you’ve recruited a large pool of people interested in testing your product. You know that your testers can make or break your beta, so how do you make sure the testers you select are top notch?

11 Tips for Recruiting Beta Candidates

This is the second installment of our Beta Tips blog series (first installment is here). Today we’re tackling recruiting beta candidates. If you want amazing beta testers, you need to start with a strong pool of candidates. These tips should help you recruit the right people and set the right expectations for your test.

12 Tips for Planning Your Beta Test

This week we’re launching a new blog series: Beta Tips. Each post will cover tips for handling a different stage of your beta test. These tips comes from our own best practices after years of running beta tests. We’ve also included tips from a number of our clients, including Adobe, Autodesk, Avid, TiVo, Symantec, and UPS. These tips and more can be found in our free eBook: 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests.

7 Beta Testing Terms You Need to Know

We throw around a lot of terminology on our website and in our resources. Today we wanted to take a moment and clarify what some of those beta terms mean. The terms and definitions below are taken from our free eBook: 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests.

Centercode Partners with The Brandery

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Cincinnati’s nationally-ranked startup accelerator The Brandery. Centercode will be providing beta management software and guidance to The Brandery’s 2012 class of 11 promising startups as they beta test their first products. Each year The Brandery chooses a group of startups to take part in their 14-week accelerator program. […]

We’ve Given the Site a Fresh Coat of Paint!

We’ve been really busy lately, running exciting beta tests with clients old and new, working on new free resources like our beta ROI kit and our book on beta testing, and a bunch of other stuff that’s coming soon! But we realized it’d been a while since we’d given the Centercode site some “love”.

Channeling Beta Feedback: Discussion Forums

While user forums are commonplace in most beta programs, many project managers struggle to discover the true value that they provide. At the most basic level, forums provide a way for testers to interact with each other. There are three reasons this is important.

10 Tips for Writing Great Beta Surveys

During your beta test, you want to get as much useful feedback out of your testers as you can. But each tester only has a limited amount of time and energy to devote to your test. Surveys, if used properly, are a great way to get the most out of your testers and their time. Here are some quick tips to help make your surveys awesome and get the data you need.

What Type of Beta Am I Running?

Recently, we announced our ongoing What You Need to Know Series. Each chapter of the series will look at a different type of beta test and its challenges. Our goal with this series is to give you the ability to create a custom roadmap based on the specific needs of your beta. In order to do that you will need to answer one very important question: What type of beta am I running?

What You’ll Find in Our Beta Management Guide

Last week we launched our What You Need to Know Series. Each chapter of the series will cover a different type of beta test, and its challenges, goals, and benefits. Our ultimate goal is to combine these chapters into a book that our readers can use to run almost any kind of beta.

Beta Test Our Upcoming Beta Management Book

While we’re very proud of these resources, we’ve yet to cover beta categorically, from A to Z. With our latest (and biggest) project, we’re changing that. What You Need to Know About Beta is a series of detailed guides that will ultimately come together to form a book that we plan to publish, providing in-depth information covering all aspects of beta testing, including its many variations ranging from mobile to enterprise.

Introducing the Beta Test ROI Kit

Today we’re excited to release a free kit that focuses on the ROI (return on investment) of beta testing. Despite being such an important topic in terms of proving value, determining budget, and justifying expenditures, beta test ROI has gotten a bad rap as a near-impossible calculation. It’s understandable, since the lack of tools or discussions on the subject left people to reinvent the wheel each time. However, those dark days are gone with the release of Centercode’s Beta ROI whitepaper, calculator, and video tour.

Hiring a Great Beta Program Manager

There’s a lot that goes into hiring for your beta program and a lot that rides on your decision. The person will be managing a process that can make or break your product, saving or costing you large sums of money. But you don’t have to approach this undertaking without guidance. Whether you call the position Beta Program Manager, Beta Test Manager, or Beta Test Engineer we’ve got advice that will help you target the right qualifications and candidates. We’ve even put together a sample beta job posting that you can use as a template.

Mike Fine Visits The Startup Slingshot

Events

Our Director of Client Services and resident Beta Testing Guru, Mike Fine, was a recent guest on The Startup Slingshot, where he gave a video interview on beta testing recruitment, motivation, and more. If you’re not familiar with the site, The Startup Slingshot is a great online resource for entrepreneurs, with videos and articles on a wide variety of topics that help startups achieve better results. We recommend checking it out.

Scheduling Meetings With Your Beta Testers

There’s a long-standing practice in Marketing, Product Development, and Usability Testing called “following your customer home” Intuit’s famous Follow Me Homes are a great example. The practice is also gaining traction in beta testing, so we thought now would be a good time to discuss some best practices and caveats for scheduling meetings with beta testers. Done correctly, these meetings can have a great effect on participation and open doors to insights that are hard to obtain through other methods.

Free Whitepaper: Getting Ready for Beta Testing

With 2012 rapidly approaching, we’re releasing another free beta testing resource that we hope will be very helpful as companies get ready to launch new products in the upcoming year. The whitepaper, entitled Getting Ready for Beta Testing, explores tips and best practices that product developers can rely on as they grapple with the question of when to begin their beta test.

5 Big Picture Beta Test Planning Tips

With the release of our software and hardware beta test planning kits, there’s been a lot of focus on beta planning details recently. So we thought this would be a good time to step back and take a look at the big picture. After all, what good is all that time spent on planning if you can’t see the forest for the trees? These five big picture tips, taken from our free resource 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests, will help you approach beta planning with the necessary perspective.

Our Software Beta Planning Kit is Now Available

A detailed beta test plan is one of the key components of a successful beta test. When your beta test is well-organized from the start, it allows you to stay focused on your product during testing, rather than playing catch up. To help more people develop great beta test plans, we decided to create free beta test planning kits. We started with a hardware beta test planning kit, and today we’re publishing a kit for software betas that caters more to software-specific topics like digital distribution and product keys. So whether you’re running a desktop, mobile, gaming, or web beta, our beta test planning kit can help you do it better.

Announcing our Free Hardware Beta Planning Kit

Like all projects, a successful beta test begins with a well-developed plan. Our objective is to make that planning easier by offering resources built on our 10+ years of experience in beta management. One important lesson we’ve learned is that creating a hardware beta plan is decidedly different from creating a software beta test plan. There are subtle nuances in areas like budgeting and product distribution and completely new problems like acquiring beta hardware and replacing defective units. We’ll help you prepare for all of them.

Is Big Data the Future for Big Beta?

Generally, we try to keep our blog posts focused on the here and now. Our primary goal is to give people practical advice on how to manage better beta tests. Sometimes, though, it’s interesting to think about possible futures for beta testing. And recent research from HP on data mining unstructured textual data, like social media and product reviews, is great material for that kind of thinking.

Rewarding Your Beta Testers with Incentives

As you might expect, beta testing incentives are a popular topic. In fact, “incentives” is one of our most common Google search keywords. Testers want to know what they get for participating in betas, and companies want to know what’s appropriate to offer them. As it turns out, being conscientious about your approach to incentives is very smart. There are several key things that companies need to be aware of when it comes to rewarding their testers. We talked about many of these issues in our free eBook, 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests, but they’re important enough to warrant a second look in the blog.

Centercode Connect 9.4 Released

We’re happy to announce the release of Centercode Connect 9.4 this week, with customer roll-outs beginning today. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the new features and improvements from this release, including a brand new module called Assigned Test Platforms.

Learning to Love the Novice Beta Tester

We often get emails from upset applicants who weren’t selected for a beta test despite impressive credentials. And sometimes we see companies that only want to select tech-savvy beta testers. In both cases, there’s a simple misunderstanding about beta tests that we’d like to clear up. A tester team needs to reflect the product’s target market, which usually means recruiting testers with all levels of expertise — even low levels. When you rely solely on expert beta testers, your results can be incomplete if not misleading.

Why Geography Matters in Beta Recruitment

We talked last week about where to find beta testers, but there’s another important “where” when it comes to beta recruitment. Where do your testers live? Geographic location is an oft-neglected factor in beta testing, but it can be critically important. So today, we’re going to look at situations in which where your testers live matters just as much as other demographic characteristics.

7 More Beta Tester Recruiting Sources

At Adobe, we’re always trying to introduce new testers into our prerelease program (that’s what we call beta). There are many benefits to getting new testers into each prerelease cycle. Not only are more testers expected to generate more feedback, they also increase the likelihood that your product is tested by people from different industries, geographies, profiles and with varied system configurations and expertise levels. The challenge for many beta managers, though, is where do these new testers come from? To help, here are 7 tips you can use to grow your tester community — many of which have worked very well for us.

Free eBook: 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests

We’re happy to announce that our long-awaited eBook, 100 Tips for Better Beta Tests, is now available. This free 32-page guide offers tips on all phases of beta testing, from planning through completion, with a mixture of our own best practices and contributions from test managers at Adobe, Avid, Autodesk, Symantec, TiVo, and UPS.

Improving Your Beta Program with Personas

Personas are a big part of product marketing, but they’re generally underutilized in beta testing. We have some clients who’ve carried personas into their beta programs, but they’re in the minority. On the other hand, they’re a very successful minority. So, in this blog post, we’re exploring ways that you can apply customer persona techniques to help improve your next beta test.

Free eBook: Reaching 90% Beta Participation

Whenever we give a demo to potential clients, we have a slide in our deck that outlines the five biggest challenges teams face in beta testing their products. What we’ve seen is that most beta programs are experiencing several if not all of these challenges, so we decided to publish a series of free guides to help! Today we’re releasing the first installment, which tackles the biggest challenge of them all — beta participation.

Centercode Acquires Customer Feedback Solutions

We’re very excited to announce Centercode’s acquisition of Customer Feedback Solutions (CFS, custfeedback.com), a New York-based provider of beta test and feedback management solutions. The executive team at CFS felt that Centercode was a great fit based on our industry knowledge, comprehensive offering, and experience in supporting, complex web-based applications and the needs of their customers.

Dealing with Critical Bugs at the Beta Stage

When you encounter a critical issue in a beta test, things can get out of hand quickly. Your testers are demanding results, your developers are demanding data, and your marketing people are demanding reassurance. What you need is a reliable series of steps to help you maintain control of your beta and reduce the heat you’re feeling. So, we’ve developed something called the ICEGAP protocol for just this situation.

Reaping the Rewards of Active Beta Management

If you want to run an effective beta test, being active and engaged every day is crucial. It can be tough if beta management isn’t your full-time job, but it’s hard to argue with the increased feedback and participation you’ll see from being that involved. And nobody wants to be the person who let critical bug reports go unnoticed for a few days. Luckily, we’ve got some helpful tips to get as much as you can from the time you have to participate.

Sharing Beta Test Data in Your Organization

If you ever find your beta program encountering resistance, take a look at where it fits in the big picture. No man is an island, and the same goes for beta programs. The more disconnected your work is from others, the harder it becomes to see the good you’re doing. But there’s one sure-fire way to get more recognition for your beta tests — sharing your test data with others. There are more teams that could benefit from it than you may realize.

Announcing our Beta Test Agreement Kit

In the spirit of helping more companies run successful beta tests, we’re happy to release our first premium content offering — the Beta Test Agreement Kit. This free download introduces companies to the different agreements commonly used in beta testing, with ready-to-use templates of the actual documents and a detailed companion guide to help explain all the legal jargon.

Can a One-Week Beta Test Still Be Effective?

People frequently ask us if there’s a minimum length for a beta test. Like many things in life, it depends. If there’s one constant, though, it’s that a one-week beta test is just too short. By understanding why that’s true, you’ll have a better idea of how long your next beta test needs to be. So, today we’re discussing 5 inherent challenges of a one-week beta test.

Using Beta Tests to Gather Marketing Data

Most people think beta tests serve one very specific purpose — ensuring product quality before you ship. Fixing bugs is important, but if your beta is designed with only that goal in mind, you’re missing out on opportunities to significantly improve the marketing of your product. We’re here to help, though, with four tips to generate valuable marketing data through your beta test.

Competitive Motivation in Beta Tests

In this post, Symantec Beta Program Manager James McKey provides a great overview of his creative method of successfully motivating beta testers using weekly rewards based on the most valuable feedback gathered.

5 Great Reasons People Become Beta Testers

There’s a common misconception that beta testers are motivated to participate solely to receive a free product in the process. While it’s true that this is a common motivation (and generally one you should avoid in your recruiting process), there are other, far better reasons why people best test. Understanding these can help you pick better testers, and ultimately increase your participation substantially.

What Makes Beta Tests Fun to Manage?

Beta testing is appealing to users for many reasons. The exclusive chance to experience something new before anyone else; an opportunity to be a part of the development process; and the wonderful incentive at the end of the test all drive them to sign up. However, beta testing is also a terrific experience for the manager.

5 Ways to Revive a Dead Beta Test

Once in a while, you’ll experience a beta test plateau. This is a situation where your test has been running for a while and tester feedback has noticeably decreased. You’re still missing some critical data and aren’t quite ready to end it. In this post we cover 5 things you can do right now to revive a dying project.

Centercode CEO Speaking SafeNet Licensing Event

Events

If you happen to be in Boston or Santa Clara next week and have an interest in SaaS business, be sure to check out the SafeNet Licensing live event “Monetizing Software in the Cloud”. Centercode’s CEO and Co-founder, Luke Freiler has been invited to speak on a panel focused on how SaaS and on-premise software vendors are dealing with software monetization in the cloud.

5 Ways to Save Time Managing Your Beta

It’s no secret that effectively managing all of the moving parts of a beta test can be a huge time sink. We’ve written up a few useful tips to help increase your efficiency throughout your betas.

Centercode Connect 9.3 Released

We’re proud to announce the release if Centercode Connect 9.3. This release greatly improves our knowledge base functionality, and simplifies the arduous task of controlling user access to resources throughout your beta tests. In addition we’ve addressed a number of outstanding bugs, and further increased performance across many areas of the platform.

5 Ways to Increase Beta Tester Participation

Consistent tester participation is the bane of most beta tests. Beta tests most commonly result in somewhere between 25% to 50% participation rates, meaning that only about one quarter to half of the beta testers participated to even the bare minimum expected of them, generally simply walking away with the product without providing any feedback at all. This is a huge waste of both time and money. Thankfully, there’s a number of simple things that can be done to raise these rates significantly.

5 Great Beta Tester Recruiting Sources

Finding the right beta testers isn’t so hard if you know where to look. This post focuses on 5 simple sources that you can use to build a great collection of qualified candidates for your beta test.

Two Questions to Ask Every Beta Applicant

There are two simple questions that you can ask your beta applicants that will get you 80% of where you need to be to pick the absolute best beta test candidates from any pool of applicants.

Alpha vs. Beta Testing

Test Strategy

In the past we’ve witnessed some confusion regarding the key differences between the Alpha Test and Beta Test phases of product development. While there are no hard and fast rules, and many companies have their own definitions and unique processes, the following information is generally true.

Holiday Beta Testing, Humbug.