Archive for testing

Creating a community of Beta Testers at Meetro

June 19, 2008 · Filed under testing · Tagged

At meetro, we created a small community of ‘beta testers’, about 40 users. These were a combination of users that were with us from the beginning, to new users that really loved our product, to friends willing to provide us with frequent feedback. What did we do to create a community of beta testers at meetro?

  • Maintained a list of users that were part of this community and useful specs on the hardware and OS they were running
  • Sent out private newsletters just to ‘beta testers’ letting them know they were a special group we valued deeply and give them frequent updates on what we were currently working.
  • Gave them early versions of our software days to weeks before the rest of our users saw it. (On a website, this could just be access to a ‘test’ or ‘development’ server.
  • With each private release we highlighted bugs we fixed, features we added, and specific parts of the software that could use their rigorous testing.
  • Kept an incredibly open line of communication with them, from personal emails to hours of IM chats walking through bugs and issues that came up

Each of these were valuable in the process, and there are even more things you can even do to build community and encourage your beta testers

  • Give them access to a bug tracker (like trac)
  • Create a forum for them so they can share questions and experiences
  • Give badges or props to the beta testers to other users on your product

Leave a comment »

Outsource your Testing & QA Departments

June 16, 2008 · Filed under testing · Tagged

The other day, somebody asked me “Where’s a good place to hire beta testers for a new website?” My answer:  If you already have a few hundred users on your site, then you’ve already have found them (and they’ll work for free.)

I think the best people to ‘test’ your product and provide feedback are your most passionate users. The users you can reward by giving private access to upcoming feature releases. There are a few reasons for this:

  1. Testing – Passionate users will *throughly* test your product. You won’t believe how much they will navigate around a website or software looking to explore and find new features. You don’t even have to create test plans – they’ll naturally do that for you.
  2. Rewards – By granting a few ‘passionate’ users secret access to new features, you’re ultimately rewarding them by saying they are most important to you and you’ll spend time with them and listen to their feedback. They will be proud to have this ‘elite’ beta status – give them a badge (if they have profiles), so they can show it off to other users.
  3. Quality Assurance – if you’re a startup running a consumer web app, your users will be very forgiving, provided that you have an open line of communication. For beta testers, this should include personal emails, newsletters, a private blog or forum, and maybe even giving out your IM handle. For everybody else, this just means that you have a place for news on your site – blog or forum – that you can clearly communicate you’re fixing bugs as you find them, what was recently fixed, and a process for users to submit new bugs.

Our next post will follow-up on an anecdote on how we used these practices at meetro.

Leave a comment »