There are two issues being debated. To underline them :
1. Betas, historically, have been massively counter productive due to the mentality, expectations and application of the testers.
2. QA process development - including community involvement - in the industry has been extremely poor. Management of those processes has also been poor. This has been convoluted by the various degrees to which companies have committed to using their community testers in their QA processes and/or using the 'beta' phases as PR.
While we are discussing them as two points, they are not disparate - 2) is causal to 1).
If the process development, communication and methodology involving the 'community' is poor then it's almost certain that the company will have the same problems in house. It's the culture that is inadequate. For example, lack of in depth technical knowledge or coordination/communication by line management leads to uncontrolled and inefficient use of dev time. eg devs just turn up at work, takes a look at the bug log, picks whatever strikes their fancy, works on it for 2 days when its fixed after 1, to get it 'just right' and enhance it.
You can't fix this from the top down. It has to be right from the foundations up. It is yet another (series of) example(s) of the culture I've been banging on about for years. Note, due to my 'mancrush' on Brett (cheers for that one, Steve
) and confidence in 38S, I'm certain this won't apply to Copernicus - which is why I was willing to put money on them not having the kind of 'betas' we are used to.
On Zehn's point, about feedback to the testers, I agree. I'm in a high profile beta at the moment. I get into the game and it's unplayable due to a graphic glitch. I've bugged it and started a thread on the relevant part of the beta forum, asking if it's a known bug or should I keep trying to fix it my end. It's been quite a while and I've had no response. They've lost a couple of weeks of my time due to lack of someone their end coordinating the bug dB with tester communication. Feedback does not need to be given on minor bug reports, but there certainly needs to be coordination and communication, if the process is going to be in any way efficient.
