Alpha Testing VS Beta Testing Important Differences

Evident from its name, Alpha testing is performed during the early stages of product development. It is conducted after system testing but long before beta testing. The testers are usually the organization’s employees, such as the QA team, engineers, or product managers. Using white box and black box techniques, the testers simulate end users’ experience by carrying out tasks the latter might likely perform. Alpha testing performed once the product has gone through stages of testing and prepared for release. It is executing before beta testing, which is also a part of acceptance testing and can define as field testing.

• This creates realistic testing conditions, trying to empathize with end-users as much as possible.
• Alpha and Beta Testing are forms of Acceptance Testing and they both try to determine how an application and its features behave.
• Also, do not provide information to the testers explaining how the product should work.
• The internal members of the organization perform this testing.
• It is called Alpha testing since it precedes the Beta testing phase.
• The test cases and tasks are divided into testing categories from which different groups of testers conduct targeted testing to ensure all-around examination of the overall software product.

They are usually customers or representatives of prospective customers of the organization that develops the software. Beta testers tend to volunteer their services free of charge but often receive versions of the product they test, discounts on the release version, or other incentives. After beta testing, the software may go through one or more release candidate phases, in which it is refined and tested further, before the final version is released. Alpha Testing predominantly occurs during the development stage when your product is 60%-80% complete. Before you begin Alpha Testing, you should already have completed concept validation, iterative usability testing, and initial QA and engineering testing to ensure the product is generally stable.

Software release life cycle

Alpha testing typically takes 1-2 weeks per test cycle, depending on how many issues are discovered and how many new features are released. It is not uncommon for the total Alpha phase to be 3-5 times the length of the following Beta phase. The objective of alpha testing is to involve customers deep into the process of development. Beta Testing helps reduce product failures and provides higher product quality through customer validation that resulted from their experience with the application.

During its supported lifetime, the software is sometimes subjected to service releases, patches or service packs, sometimes also called “interim releases” or “maintenance releases” . For example, Microsoft released three major service packs for the 32-bit editions of Windows XP and two service packs for the 64-bit editions. Such service releases contain a collection of updates, fixes, and enhancements, delivered in the form of a single installable package. Some software is released with the expectation of regular support. Classes of software that generally involve protracted support as the norm include anti-virus suites and massively multiplayer online games. Continuing with this Windows XP example, Microsoft did offer paid updates for five more years after the end of extended support.

Cypress Testing

The next step after alpha testing is beta testing which tests the product in real conditions. In beta testing, the product is distributed among a small number of end-users who test it for any bug, issue, or flaw that was not addressed during alpha testing. The team of developers provides solutions to the issues raised in the feedback either immediately or in the upcoming alpha test definition version of the software. Alpha testing is a type of acceptance testing where in-house team of developers, designers, and quality assurance staff test a product for all possible bugs, flaws, and issues in a controlled lab environment. So, instead of focusing only on alpha or beta testing, we recommend you include both testing stages in your software development lifecycle.

During this phase, developers who have strong technical knowledge of the application carry out white box testing. Their goal is to observe the application at a lower level and ensure that it is reliable. This phase of testing looks at the application’s decision coverage, statement coverage, branch coverage, and other features at the code level. Major public beta’s developed afterward, with early customers having purchased a “pioneer edition” of the WordVision word processor for the IBM PC for $49.95. Microsoft’s release of community technology previews for Windows Vista, between September 2005 and May 2006.

Alpha Test (Product) – Explained

The objective of alpha testing is to give better insight into the software’s reliability at the early stages of development. With the help of black box and white box technique, we can achieve the alpha testing. Alpha testing helps to gain confidence in the user acceptance of the software product. It can be a white box, or Black-box testing depends on the requirements – particular lab environment and simulation of the actual environment required for this testing.

If the product has more features and finds a number of uncovered defects, the testing duration will drag on. A feature complete version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. Your product should be more than halfway complete, with testers focused on finding as many bugs and major issues as possible. An alpha test is a preliminary software field test carried out by a team of users in order to find bugs that were not found previously through other tests. The main purpose of alpha testing is to refine the software product by finding the bugs that were not discovered through previous tests. The involvement of both black and white box testing helps in identifying the product’s strengths and the weaknesses thoroughly at an all-round level.

Alpha Testing vs Beta Testing: Everything you need to know

The release cannot exit alpha testing until all major issues have been resolved and the product reaches “feature lock” where no additional functionality may be added. A second phase occurs when developers turn the software over to quality assurance professionals for additional tests in a staging environment that is similar to the production environment. Tests are conducted in a staging environment so if there is a major flaw and the system breaks, the production environment won’t be affected. In February 2005, ZDNet published an article about the phenomenon of a beta version often staying for years and being used as if it were at the production level. It noted that Gmail and Google News, for example, had been in beta for a long time although widely used; Google News left beta in January 2006, followed by Google Apps , including Gmail, in July 2009.

After the bugs and issues are tracked and logged the developers work on them to fix it. Issues and flaws found out during alpha testing are addressed immediately by the developers. Certain conditions must be fulfilled before any testing takes place. Similarly, specific requirements must be met to conclude the testing phase; this refers to exit criteria. With client engineering teams to deliver thoroughly tested code. The lab environment is used to simulate the real environment.

What is alpha testing?

It is comparable to user acceptance testing, another kind of quality control. The main goal of Alpha test is to fine-tune a software product by uncovering and fixing faults that were not addressed during the initial phases of development. In alpha testing, the product is tested at a very high level using both black https://globalcloudteam.com/ box and white box testing techniques due to which its execution time is very long. Alpha testing is performed before the product releases to identify errors or bugs. It is carried out in a controlled or lab environment by an internal QA team. The aim is to ensure software quality before it goes into production.