Beta Testing | Definition, Features, Advantages, and Disadvantages

Hello friends! In this article, we are going to study one of the most common software testing types – Beta Testing. So, let’s begin.

Before shipping software to the customer or making it live to the end-users, a software undergoes thorough testing. The testing done by an internal team is Alpha testing. It is done to make sure that the application’s functionality works fine. The internal testing team tries to be in the customer’s shoes and use the application just like an end-user.

In order to get the product’s review or feedback from the end-user even before the final release of the product, we have a concept of Beta testing. Let’s learn more about it.

Definition

Beta testing is the testing done by end-users at the end user’s site.

It is also known as beta-site testing or field testing. Here, a set of potential end-users test a stable version of the application. The users test the application and provide feedback to the development team about the application’s usability, functionality, performance, and other quality attributes.

Some features of Beta testing

1. A pool of potential end-users performs it to give unbiased feedback on the product.
2. It is performed at the end user’s site.
3. The beta test execution cycle is generally smaller than the in-house (alpha) testing cycle.
4. Since the end-users testing, the beta version doesn’t have access to the source code of the product, so it involves black box testing only.

Advantages of Beta testing

1. It provides an additional level of testing/product validation to the development lifecycle of the product.
2. It helps in uncovering unexpected errors that the in-house QA team fails to catch.
3. Many times a large group of users performs this type of testing. This helps in greatly increasing the scope of testing.
4. Usually, it is cost-effective as compared to alpha testing.

Disadvantages of Beta testing

1. The bug reporting of the identified bugs is not proper and systematic.
2. The testing and test environment is not under the control of the development team. It is often hard to reproduce the bugs because the testing environment differs from user to user.
3. There are a lot of duplicate bugs.
4. If there are a lot of issues, this can cause negative publicity of the product. This is because the person testing the software are end-users only with no obligation to the development team.

That’s all I have in this post, feel free to ask any question in the comments. Check out the complete software testing tutorial here.

Software Testing Tutorial

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