If this blog has any recurring theme, it is that language doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Often times, this subjectivity can lead to great amounts of confusion and general miscommunication. Should we not expect, then, that there exist those willing to exploit such difficulties? Of course we should. This effect is seen everywhere, and we are not surprised to see it again in issues relating to software quality.
Chances are, if you haven't been asleep for the past fifteen years, you've heard the word "beta" used in a sense other than radioactivity or Greek literature. Particularly, you've probably heard it in reference to the development status of software. Historically, the progress of software progress has been described in terms of a progression from planning, feature-incomplete implementation, feature-complete implementation, tested implementation and maintained implementation. Though the precise terms used to describe these phases depends heavily upon whom you ask, there is little disagreement on the five-phase system. Some may split or divide, but these five seem to be common across categorization systems. One of the more common codification schemes involves referring to the second and third phases (call them Phase 1 and Phase 2 for now) as "alpha" and "beta," respectively. Thus, "beta" is quite often intended to refer explicity software which does everything it should, but is likely to be buggy, and in need of through testing.
At this point, many readers would do well to stop and think of what they've seen the term "beta" applied to. Gmail, which has gained no small amount of features, has been in "beta" since its inception. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is quite obviously not feature-complete, nor is the documentation even close to adaquate. Thus, we see that in both cases, the term "beta" has been shifted from meaning "feature-complete but buggy" to "people won't use it if its called alpha" in the first case, and to "we don't care enough about quality to have a bugfixing phase" in the second. Of course, the idea of distinct phases gets a bit blurry with a feature-incomplete production application. Google can't afford to have major security flaws in a production application, whether they call it beta or not. Thus, I would propose that Google fix the problem by simply choosing another word to use other than "beta." For Microsoft's part, calling Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is nothing short of a boldfaced attempt at deception. The documentation and visual styles are far from complete, and most dialogs are completely different than most others, leading to the realization that Microsoft is not really even trying at making the beta phase a quality control phase.
In summary, please be aware of what the word "beta" means, and don't let it sucker you into ignoring large and important faults of a product.
1 comment:
Chris, please contact Jim Sykes or Deirdre Helfferich ASAP about Rebekah K. Urgent.
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