We couldn’t continue our preplanned track in 2020 to beta test and release our project due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. It affects all aspects of our lives all around the world. It’s is undoubtedly the worst possible timing for our projects to go live publicly. Even testing it in the current situation would be relatively questionable.
I already explained it in detail in my last update, have a look if you’ve missed it:
This is how it always is
The truth is sometimes, no matter how hard you worked on something, or how prepared you are, the situation can get pretty f up. But, you know what? Let’s accept it and move on.
The bright side
We chose to look it from another angle, that is, how lucky we are that we didn’t start our pre-launch campaign, and we didn’t spend our marketing budget. Because the campaign would have failed, obviously, and our small budget would have been gone.
Beta 1 is done!
Well, since we don’t get bummed out this quickly, we reviewed and revised our testing and release plan. We extended the beta stage to a total of 10 phases.
We just finished the Beta 1 and decided to update you with how our current timeline looks like right now:
We’re going to perform our first beta test after the Beta 5. We haven’t decided yet about its scale. We rather make this decision later so that the development of the COVID-19 situation would probably give us a better perspective towards the future. The second 5 phases may change as time goes by.
Extended Beta phases
When the goal is to get the first version of a project out, we usually classify a lot of things as non-essential work, and consciously ignore them in the first version. The reason behind it is that most of the work we ignore may not be required at all once the end-users validated the app’s main idea. That is, once we got a better understanding of how end-users are interacting with the app. What they really want, we may decide to pivot or make some changes, which would invalidate a lot of initial non-essential work.
However, we’re under the COVID-19 pandemic that makes a full-scale validation impossible or makes it more deleterious than beneficial. So, we decided to proceed with carrying out a group of tasks that we initially put off.
Most of these tasks enhance the reliability and the performance of our system and infrastructure, and they have very little to do with the app’s features. That is why we taught it’s not a bad idea to label these phases Beta. After all, they contribute to making our beta testing better and efficient on what we developed during alpha phases.
Alright, that’s it. Till the next beta phase,
Stay safe, practice and respect social distancing, and
Cheers!