Alpha, Beta, GA and other useless labels

Over the years I’ve seen dev teams poorly served by the use of release labels, such as: alpha, beta and GA. When these labels are introduced, they are normally in the context of some specific goals for the software in mind. The problem is that business people and technical people have a hard time understanding each other’s goals, and you end up with a decent amount of misalignment.

For example, an engineering team may think “GA” means “no bugs”, or “highly scalable”, or even “perfect”. For product managers and marketers in general, “GA” might mean “we can charge people and they will generally be happy with the experience”. For others, the meaning might be “our users have accepted this solution as ready”.

Because of the differing views, you end up in these endless scope discussions. Furthermore, a lot of tension between functional and non-functional requirements emerges. You end up with “postalpha 2″ type release milestones… a whole mess.

I propose a much simpler nomenclature.

• Demo — a release that somebody in your company uses for demoing the software to others. No real users.
• Preview — a release intended purely for a small group of prospective users and get their feedback what the software does
• Test X — where x is a sequential number. A release intended for users that has a incremental functional subsets with incrementally evolving non-functional requirements. So you say “we are working towards Test Release 1, which includes this and that”.
• Commercial — the milestone where you’re ready to charge for the service.

And once you’ve achieved that milestone and your software is available to the general public, you can talk about environments: production, where your service is running, “next” which is where your users can see the next version of the software. “Sandbox”, if they can access their data in an account that they can mess up, “Developer”…. etc.

With this approach you can minimize confusion among engineers and everybody else at the company. You get to focus on adding incremental value and hopefully enjoy the fruits.