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+--- Thread: When does beta become alpha software? (/showthread.php?tid=63440)
When does beta become alpha software? - ignitedcms - 10-30-2015
Daft question most probably as it seems obvious. But when do you consider your software at the end of its beta stages and user ready.
I understand that even in production ready is still has the potential for bugs, also if no one is testing your software, except yourself and you don't do unit tests per se, how confident can you be, in it being post beta and now in the production ready stages.
Looking forward to hearing ideas.
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - cartalot - 10-30-2015
you got me curious about where / why we call software alpha, beta, etc
this is worth skimming over to get the history, and also what the original requirements etc are for each term
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle
A -> B -> C -> RTM -> GA
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - PaulD - 10-30-2015
That is is an interesting article.
For me it is like this
Alpha: I am still building it
Beta: Its sort of done but full of bugs, so I wouldn't use it but I need help finding where it is not quite working
Release Candidate: I'm fed up with it now and have a new project to work on
Stable Version 1.0 : It works as far as I can tell and I need a break because if I have to spend any more time on this I am quite literally going to kill myself.
I think you can name stuff any way you want really.
There was an open source project I loved way back when that had named versions. I quite liked it but it was confusing really. So v1.x was called 'Emergence', v2.x was called 'daytime', version 3.x (that never came) was called something like 'metamorphosis'. (I loved that one)
But then you had all the 'I'm using daytime, should I upgrade to Emergence' sort of confusions.
I think CI4 should be called CodeIgniter - FlameThrower :-)
But I might have had a couple of glasses of wine and should probably stop posting now.
Paul.
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - Martin7483 - 10-30-2015
hmmm alcohol
![[Image: 45622985.jpg]](http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/45622985.jpg)
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - PaulD - 10-30-2015
LOL
Apparently LOL is too short for this forum to accept so - LOL, LOl,Lol,lol,l
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - ciadmin - 10-30-2015
We need a "like" button for the above two responses
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - Martin7483 - 10-30-2015
(10-30-2015, 03:51 PM)ciadmin Wrote: We need a "like" button for the above two responses
I agree
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - includebeer - 10-30-2015
(10-30-2015, 03:03 PM)PaulD Wrote: Alpha: I am still building it
Beta: Its sort of done but full of bugs, so I wouldn't use it but I need help finding where it is not quite working
Release Candidate: I'm fed up with it now and have a new project to work on
Stable Version 1.0 : It works as far as I can tell and I need a break because if I have to spend any more time on this I am quite literally going to kill myself.
The best explanation I've seen so far !
RE: When does beta become alpha software? - Narf - 10-31-2015
Beta doesn't become Alpha ... it's the other way around.
First, there's the development or "pre-alpha" versions - this is when your actual development happens.
Alpha is the first working version of the software, the first thing anybody else but the developer could test. But is still in active development and trivial bugs are expected.
Beta is the first feature-complete version of the software. No new functionalities are added at this point and it's now relatively non-obvious bugs that you're after.
Release candidate is something a bit more confusing, because it may as well be the final version. RCs are supposed to be suitable for use by the general public, but at the same time being a last-resort effort to find hidden/subtle/hard-to-spot bugs, and you mostly rely on actualy users reporting them.
When you no longer receive reasonable bug reports, that last RC is "tagged" as the final version and your job is done.