Need Beta Testers

In the previous post, I might have said something about "the handful of beta testers I have". Well, to be honest, I only have 1 confirmed, and 1 who said he was interested but I'm sure has gone on holiday and so has not read the email I sent.

I think 5 would do it, to spread the load a bit. (Even though I expect only about 10 customers in the end :-)

What's a beta tester?

Well, software has different releases. You're probably familiar with version 1.0.0, 2.0.0, etc. But actually, there are versions before version 1.0.0.

Alpha release: wow, probably so many bugs left that it's still unusable.
Beta release: still bugs, but people can start to use the software so that even more bugs can be found and fixed before releasing the official version.
Release Candidate (RC): just that - this release could potentially become v1.0.0. In reality there'll still be a couple of bugs, so you'll see RC1, RC2.
Version 1.0.0: the actual release available to the public.
Version 1.0.1: the seemingly mandatory stability release, to fix that one major flaw that was only picked up after making it available to the public.

Anyway, beta testers come in at the Beta release phase. Normally they don't get any money for doing this, but they get other goodies. They probably get the software for free. Some people also become beta testers to get their foot in the door of that company.

In my case, beta testers will get free subscription to everything I offer.

In return, it wouldn't be enough to just set it up on their machine and send me errors if they happen to come across them. They would actually use all functionality available, and purposely try to break stuff. And when it breaks (and it will), send me details of what they did, what they thought should happen, and what actually happened.

So, would you like to be a beta tester? If so, please write to my email address listed on the Contact Me page.

Remember it's not just free software - you need to do something in return for it. If more than a couple of people respond, then first-in-first-served wouldn't really be fair due to time differences. I'll probably do a random draw or something.

You'll need a computer running a version of Windows that can install the .NET framework, and you'll need version 2.0 of that framework (available free from the Windows Update page).