Beta Testing

[Matt N]

I've been developing a contact management website and software solution and am close to completion. How do I go about beta testing both the software and site in a way that gives me a good range of OS's and technical ability within the user group?

Any advice, personal experiences, or suggested links appreciated!

Cheers,

Matt

[LazyJim]

good question, I'de love to hear how it goes but have no experiecne to offer on this.

If you mean how do you find the users to test with, then assuming you are not part of a company that does user testing often, or can't afford a user testing agency, the only thing I can suggest is getting a range of beta testers on the web, but this is not ideal as you can't observe... unless perhaps you could use the MSN Messenger "Application sharing" and "Audio conversation"?

Alternatively, ask all your friends. Using friends for beta testing can be a blessing and a curse, on the one hand they can by 'nice' and say everything is good, on ther other hand they can be brutaly honest and say everything is crap. Of course you should be watching what they actually do and where they hit problems or take longer to figure somethig out than you expected.

You could use friends for obversation and usage testing, then write a test script of many tasks to complete with your software along with expected result of each action. Send this to people on the web who have the hardware and operating systems you need to test on, and ask them to try and complete the test-script, filling in the "what happened" column as they go.