Windows 7 Beta Testing
Irfan | March 7, 2009Ed Bott has an interesting article up called Five things every Windows beta tester should know. In hit he defends – somewhat – the decisions made by the Windows 7 development team to run the beta process as they are. It is basically a direct response to community criticism that accused Microsoft of not listening enough to Windows 7 beta testers. It basically boils down to the influence that the beta testers – at least the more prominent ones – actually have and want. There is a discrepancy between those two which is the source of all the criticism that Microsoft is currently facing.
Is it problematic if Microsoft is handing out a more or less feature complete version of Windows 7 to the beta testers? Was not it always the case that beta testers were mainly there for finding bugs and problems in the software rather than suggesting new features? While it surely cannot hurt to provide Microsoft with insight about features or changes to existing applications it should probably not be priority number one. And Microsoft did change some of the behavior in the operating system thanks to criticism and suggestions by beta testers, think of the UAC behavior in Windows 7 for one.
Source: Windows 7 News
