Beta Testing Promotion on Blog

[cfaslave]

I'm glad to see SS promoting the BTV beta testing on the blog SEE POST HERE

The more testers, the better in my opinion. More problems can be identified early and hashed out before gold release. If you don't mind being a guinea pig and like to try out the latest features before they are released, I recommend you give beta testing a try.

It would be nice to see some beta testing of Beyond Media features also though.

[ClamsTheCat]

I would love to guinea pig the software. Unfortunately the wife would be pissed. She just wants it to work. She likes it when I add new features, but doesn't want to have to pay for them with any frustration.

The ladies and their instant gratification...I may add an old tuner into my desktop to do some testing.

[cfaslave]

Yes, I do have the Wife Acceptance Factor to worry about when testing. To get around that, I run a disc image before each new release just in case I have to go back to the old version. Thus far, I haven't had any hiccups that the wife has ever noticed when testing. I know some of the testers run the betas on a separate machine though.

[nanook105]

I always apply betas to all of my servers/links. On the servers, I just back up the settings during the first beta cycle (and again if I have made a number of changes during the beta cycles).

My family has come to understand that they are part of the beta testing cycle and have to report issues to me. They also get excited about new features/bug fixes that impact them so I always mention them and tell them that they need to make sure and test bugs to validate that they are fixed.

So far, with all of the betas that I have tested, I have only had to uninstall/reinstall once (boy - am I jinxing myself).

[crush157]

Originally Posted by nanook105

My family has come to understand that they are part of the beta testing cycle and have to report issues to me. They also get excited about new features/bug fixes that impact them so I always mention them and tell them that they need to make sure and test bugs to validate that they are fixed.

So, the family that tests together, stays together....

I couldn't resist...

I would never get to do that.

[cfaslave]

I noticed pvrwire had a link and story about the beta testing invites. An interesting "observation/speculation" made by the writer of the pvrwire story:

And there's been high hopes of a merger between BeyondTV and Beyond Media (a separate program for music, pictures, videos, weather and all those other things that Windows Media Center does natively). I doubt we'll see a combined BeyondTV and Beyond Media product until version 5.0 at the earliest though.

[merrypig]

I sure hope people sign up; maybe Zack'll stop spamming my mail box with requests to do so then

[Eric3a]

Yes Zack's been a little overactive hasn't he?!

Thus far, I haven't had any hiccups that the wife has ever noticed when testing.

Same here. I usually begin the Beta tests late at night so I avoid install problems and weed out simple problems.
Always backup, but so far Beta testing on my main machines hasn't created many problems.

My wife is aware when we Beta test and I usually show her the new features, so no problem there.

Get testing. It's fun and once in a while you get to spen a whole night resintalling everything. (extremely rare.)
Eric

[nanook105]

Originally Posted by Eric3a

Get testing. It's fun and once in a while you get to spen a whole night resintalling everything. (extremely rare.)
Eric

But, we do actually have lives ?