Beta is an early release of software or some other product or service to see how users use it to inform further development of it.
TL;DR
When software has all of its planned features but is still likely to include bugs and performance or stability issues it is often made available to a group of testers as a beta release. How beta testers use the software informs bug fixes and performance and stability enhancements ultimately leading to a stable release of the software to a wider audience.
Beta (pronounced bee-tuh) is a term used to describe a common phase in a software release life cycle following a more limited alpha phase. It generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain known or unknown bugs and performance or stability issues. As part of the phase, a beta release version of the software is made available outside of the organisation that developed it. A beta release can be open or closed, depending on whether the software is available to anyone or is available only to a specific group of users. Where software is complex, more than one beta phase may occur.
During the beta phase, typically beta testing, usability testing, bug fixing and performance and stability enhancements occur. This is often informed by feedback from beta testers (i.e. users who take up the software). Their feedback can be direct, such as when they report issues with beta software themselves, or indirect, such as by sharing usage data. Most commonly, beta testers are invited to participate in the beta program. Their participation in beta testing is often incentivised through access to the software before wider release, discounts on the release version when it is release and/or other incentives.
When beta software is considered stable enough to be a stable version of the software it is called a release candidate (RC). The final release candidate – or the release candidate version that has passed all stages of verification and tests and where any known remaining bugs are considered acceptable – is called a stable release or production release, and is the version that goes into production.
Many of the phases are named after letters of the Greek alphabet. Beta is named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet (uppercase Β, lowercase β). This naming convention reportedly started at IBM from at least the 1950s.
While the idea of beta has been associated with software development, it is increasingly used to also describe a testing phase for other products or services before they are widely released.
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Disclosure
AI use
This blog post was drafted using Google Docs. Some parts of the text were drawn from or inspired by text generated using AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more → {using the prompt ‘Define and describe Beta in a simple and engaging way for non-techies’} using Google Gemini (Enterprise for Google Workspace) and GhatGPT (GPT-4o). No text was incorporated verbatim. All text in this resource was included at my discretion.
Provenance
This resource was produced by Elliott Bledsoe from Agentry, an arts marketing micro-consultancy. It was first published on 28 Aug 2024. It was updated on 31 Aug 2024. This is version 1.1.
Questions, comments and corrections are welcome – get in touch with Elliott if you have feedback.
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