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?
The answer is a little tricky. The truth is you probably aren’t running one type of beta but are really running a couple different types. Your product, your goals, and your situation make your beta test unique.
After a lot of whiteboarding, we’ve chosen to look at beta test types based on four questions:
- What is your product type?
- What is your target market?
- What is your primary goal for this test?
- What phase of development are you in?
Each question has a handful of beta types that fall underneath them. We’ve used the checklist below to illustrate a traditional, performance-based, hardware beta test aimed at the business market. If you were running this beta, it would fall under four beta types: hardware, business, performance, and pre-release. You would need to take into account the challenges of all four types when planning your beta.
Our plan right now is to organize our What You Need to Know series based on the categories and types above. But, as we mentioned when we launched the series, we want our readers to guide the creation of this book. So, what do you think? How would you categorize beta traits? What beta types are we missing? Is there anything we aren’t considering?
Let us know your thoughts!
Word cloud courtesy of Wordle.
