How do you perform a Beta Test?

Question

I have a new online program I need to beta test, does anyone know of how to run a good beta test or a website that shows you how?

Answer 1

Well, I would disagree with Kasey on this one.. If you are referring to beta testing as in acceptance testing i.e. putting the site up for a limited audience to gather responses, then its already narrow enough to warrant an answer. For this type of testing, there are a variety of frameworks that could be of use for you, but the question is what you want to accomplish.

Selenium is an excellent platform agnostic testing framework which will allow you to even test AJAX, but it might not do what you want it to do. It will more or less allow you to create a test suite with specific tests that will ensure that a form field is on the page, that the page contains a certain word, that a certain action leads to a desired result in the browser, etc, stuff like that. There's a bunch of other ones that are broader, too such as Fitnesse and there are even test frameworks that are specific for your language/environment, so again, this might not be for you.

I guess this is as far as I can answer your question, but like I said, I really like Selenium and its worked out great for our team in testing a large e-commerce site to ensure that things are getting outputted to the screen as expected and more importantly, that it doesn't break as new browsers come out etc.

Answer 2

I'm afraid it depends on the program itself.

You want blackbox or whitebox testing?

Software testing is almost as complicated as software engineering. It's not something we can explain in a couple paragraphs.