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July 22, 2009
When does an Alpha become a Beta?
Today it seems like all web sites and web services start out as Beta. Some (can you say GMail) seem to stay in Beta FOREVER. You rarely see Alpha on anything. I have seen sites in “Beta” that totally don’t work and are missing major check the box features. There seems to be a wide variance on what people call Alpha, Beta and “live” software. In the Greek Alphabet, it goes Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Have you ever seen a software version in Gamma? Believe it or not, I have an opinion on all this.
Back in the old waterfall package software business, we used release numbers 1.0, 2.0, etc. Major releases were whole numbers, minor releases were fractions (.1, .2, etc.). In that world as a software consumer I had a policy to never use anything lower than 3.0. Remember Windows 1.0? It wasn’t until Windows for Workgroups (actually 3.1) that it actually worked more than it failed. With web sites, where you can upgrade very day, the lines are less clear. At Kashless.org, we update the live site 3-7 times a week. The traditional release numbering system would get crazy fast. Here is how we do it at Kashless.org.
When designing Kashless.org, we identified 12 major features which when added together would make the Kashless.org marketplace 10X better than existing marketplaces. So a version 1.0 of each of those 12 features is what the Alpha dev schedule included. My system for release of a web service is a four step process:
Private Alpha – This is the first version of your site that you want your friends to see. Put a password on it. Make people request an invite. This has LOTS of bugs, has only about 10-20% of the features you are planning to run. Limit this to < 500 people. 1-3 months. At Kashless.org we opened the private Alpha in January 2009.
Public Alpha – When the site is mostly stable and 20-30% feature complete, take the password off and let the public pound on it. If your site is geographical, limit the Alpha to one geography. Keep adding major features ever couple of weeks. Alpha should be 3-12 months depending on how much dev work you have. At Kashless.org we entered public alpha in late February 2009 for Seattle only.
Public Beta – When the site is feature complete with a version 1.0 of every major feature you hope to develop, you are done with the Alpha. The Beta is about getting users, expanding geographically and focusing on scalability. Beta should be between 6-24 months depending on how long it takes to get to scale. Kashless.org is going into Beta this week with the launch of Portland, New York, and Spokane.
Gamma – no qualifier – When you have whipped most of the scalability issues, have reached critical mass on users (whatever that is for you) and have a stable version 1.0 of every major feature you planned to build, you have a live, fully released product. Take all qualifiers off and just use your brand. You can of course add more features later and you don’t need to make revision notations.
So your initial feature set is your Alpha development work. The Alpha is for major feature development. The Beta is for scalability, usability and geographic expansion. That’s how we do it at Kashless.org.
Posted by Martin at July 22, 2009 12:29 PM
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