It's Getting Beta All The Time

As of yesterday, when I sent out an email to the first group of lucky users, the PeerBackup Beta Test Programme has started!

Woohoo!!! A pretty major, and slightly scary milestone - I’ve sent my software out into the world for real people to use. Hopefully they’ll all like it. Or at least tell me if they don’t, or what about it they don’t like, or want to improve, or wish that it did.

As with most things software-development-related, Joel Spolsky has written an article about running a Beta Test programme. In it, he advises at least four beta releases; at least a fortnight between releases; 100 beta testers, making sure that for each release there are some testers getting your software for the first time.

Before reading that, I’d been slightly optimistically expecting to spend around a month beta testing before the first proper release of PeerBackup. I’m still aiming to come in slightly under Joel’s “eight to ten weeks”, if only so that I’ll still hit it after adding the extra things I’ve not realised I need to do yet…

Making sure that for each release there are some people getting PeerBackup for the first time makes sense too. I know that I would spend the most time playing with some software the first time I get it. So if you’ve signed up for the beta programme, first off: Thanks! and secondly, don’t worry that you’ve not heard back from me yet, you’ll just get an even more solid and fantastic version soon…

I’m also a bit short of the “recommended” hundred beta testers, so if you’re running Windows and have broadband, there’s still plenty of time to pop over to the PeerBackup page and sign up. Go on, you can tell your grandchildren that you were there at the start of the revolution in easy-to-use, Internet-enabled backup software. Or something.