Question Never again publicly release alpha test version

I have to admit the subject I've chosen for this discussion doesn't sound very "friendly". I also have to warn people that what I'm about to write will be controversial, it won't be music to your ears, and many people may want to turn off now. The most important point that I want to make is that the following opinions are only mine.

Most people haven't a clue what is meant by the term alpha release. They see the word "release" and they imagine that the product is available for public consumption. Nothing could be further from the truth! According to Wikipedia , the term alpha test means "simulated or actual operational testing by potential users/customers or an independent test team at the developers' site. Alpha testing is often employed for off-the-shelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing, before the software goes to beta testing" The key element in this definition is the phrase "at the developers' site". Alpha test software is not normally taken off-site.

The same Wikipedia article goes on to say "Beta testing comes after alpha testing. Versions of the software, known as beta versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team. The software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs. Sometimes, beta versions are made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users." The key phrase here is "limited audience outside of the programming team". In other words, there's an implication that alpha testing (that precedes beta testing) should normally be confined to those who have expert knowledge and experience with the product being tested.

There are other definitions of the term alpha testing, but they're all fairly similar. Alpha testing implies intimate knowledge of the product that's being tested. Whatever definition you agree with, alpha testing should only be done "in-house".

Test versions (alpha or beta) never come with any commitment of support. If you use a test version, you're on your own. You want support? Don't even ask. What part about the word "no" don't you understand?

A couple of weeks ago the Kunena developers invited everyone at www.kunena.com to download an alpha test release of Kunena forum software ... and that's when all the problems began! In spite of issuing countless warnings that Kunena 1.5.0a was an alpha test product, that it had unidentified defects and bugs, that it was not to be used for production purposes and that no support would be offered for it, people downloaded and installed the software and reported their tales of woe here, hoping that they'd get help.

A further complication arose because, at the same time as the public release of Kunena 1.5.0a, the development team also released Kunena 1.0.9. Kunena 1.0.9 was the version I was most interested in but, before I upgraded my websites, I wanted to be sure that it was safe. So I watched and saw the reports come in. To my horror, people reported dozens of errors - and so I held back on my upgrade plans - but it later turned out that 95% of those problems related to 1.5.0a! Worse still, I wasted a lot of time investigating these reports to see if they might affect me.

I would like to say this in a less abrasive way but ... people are dumb! The simple truth is that "ordinary users" - if you understand my meaning - cannot be trusted to use to test versions of new products in a responsible manner. I hope the development team learns from this exercise: never again publicly release an alpha test version. Keep alpha test in quarantine. Only allow a limited number of trusted users to participate in the alpha testing. In this way it will save the developers' time and it will save "ordinary users", like me, time too.

I hope my comments won't be taken as unfair criticism of the mistakes that the development team has made. We learn from our mistakes. We don't need to continually remind people that they're only human. I think it was ill-advised to release an alpha test version to the public and it's my hope that the same mistake won't be repeated. I'm not trying to tell the development team how to do their job; there may have been good reasons why they decided to go with a public release of the alpha. If I'm wrong I'll cop the criticism that comes. If I'm right I won't be smug and say "I told you so".

Yes, we're all eager for Kunena 1.5; it's the most-voted request that users want. We all want to see how it will work. But we also have to learn restraint and patience.

Thank you, Kunena team, for a really great software development. If I didn't believe in Kunena, I wouldn't spend so much of my time here, now would I?

Shut your mouth kid.

Just kidding. No, I fully agree your points and you do not need to apologies for your notes. What I would like to comment on is, to begin with, people are not dumb. I think that you value this project dearly, like many of us, but understand that this is released for free and grabbed by all types of webmasters. Some people just dont give much damn about alpha, they just install it and hope it works, and if it doesnt, simply ask the board.

What you did forget to mark is this rather unorganised website. What they should have done is to make two seperate threads for the two releases (something that I believe happened when they realised that it went mental). I think if this website/forums would be more organised, it would be less "dumb" posts and users self troubleshooting.

I think honestly that design have always been a issue for the kunena/fireboard team. I mean, have a look at the fireboard website, its a joke. First time I went there, I had to double check that that was actually the download site, and not a frakking random SPAM domain.

Sorry for going a little bit off topic. I will make a seperate post for this later.

NOTE; No offence to the kunena team. The only reason why I am mentioning this is to make the website better.

Thank you very much for your comments and support. I could have written much more but I wanted to keep things "brief". I was editing my remarks (about the "people are dumb" observations") at the same time as you posted your comments. :laugh: You might like to re-read that area.

With regard to one comment you made,

What you did forget to mark is this rather unorganised website. What they should have done is to make two seperate threads for the two releases (something that I believe happened when they realised that it went mental). I think if this website/forums would be more organised, it would be less "dumb" posts and users self troubleshooting.

I have written extensively on that subject: see Version specific categories for Kunena website forum

What I never worked out was why wasn't 1.5a only released to those in the Kunena Test group - www.kunena.com/groups/viewgroup/43-Kunena+Testers

This is the place for Alpha versions.

I am reasonlably clued up and have made a concous decision to avoid 1.5a even on my localised testing environments until Beta as I feel I would only report problems and offer no real solutions.

Full credit to the Dev team for feeling they could trust the community here to work with an Alpha version .. pitty a majority have proven so unworthy of that trust.

Perhaps the 1.5a download should be pulled for now ??

Thanks all for your opinions and feedback, rest assured we take them into account and are already working in organizing site better. Truth is, kunena has grown way beyond our expectations in quite little time, at first we wanted to have a simple forum to hold what we supposed would be a small bunch of users, and keep growing from that, we all suffered old fb forum messiness, we didn't expect to grow so fast and our forums grew too small in little time. Sorry about that.

I think honestly that design have always been a issue for the kunena/fireboard team. I mean, have a look at the fireboard website, its a joke. First time I went there, I had to double check that that was actually the download site, and not a frakking random SPAM domain.

Hope you notice we're not same boj people from back then and usability and design are one of our top interest, but there are more urgent issues

I am reasonlably clued up and have made a concous decision to avoid 1.5a even on my localised testing environments until Beta as I feel I would only report problems and offer no real solutions.

Although you may feel this is the safest aproach for your testing enviroment, testing env. is for that and we really need the feedback from it, so if you want fast and stable development, please, "risk" your TESTING ENVIROMENT, NEVER LIVE SITES, and help us get there faster

It may seem as k1.5.0a release was a rush, and it was not, in fact we even pushed our releases (both) back to give time to CB team to finish a few things we needed for integration, K1.5.0a had been in internal testing for a good 2 weeks before we pushed the release, and it was basically to find things our testing enviroments could not reproduce, having a close group of testers is good, to find massive bugs, but the small ones need further testing from bigger groups. Also, the problems have not been massive nor that extended, I myself use 1.5 release on my live site (kids don't repeat at home), and haven't got any of the problems reported here (have some minor ones) on forums, and I'm using it out of the box (I want it that way for clean testing/bug hunting) no editing needed beyond language files

thanks!

Bummer... I understand your frustration...

Alpha for me meant to stay away until at least beta for testing... I can't fix the problems that will come up so don't even try!

Wait until there is an RC and then submit bugs which will at that point be easier to resolve by myself and others.

Alpha is always scary!

Agree with 2nd or 3rd poster... Shame on "us" for betraying the trust and not understanding the meaning of alpha...

Thx THough!

johnnydement wrote:

Although you may feel this is the safest aproach for your testing enviroment, testing env. is for that and we really need the feedback from it, so if you want fast and stable development, please, "risk" your TESTING ENVIROMENT, NEVER LIVE SITES, and help us get there faster

I have taken the plunge with a 2nd Testing environment now fully dedicated to 1.5a only testing

Before I start posting errors/issues/advice/screams of pain or joy I think there needs to be a seperate 1.5a testing catagory to keep 1.08/1.09 errors and 1.5 errors seperate and help reduce confussion.

BTW - keep up the outstanding work Dev team - I can't believe how far this has come in such a short time frame.

As always we thank all of you for you candid feedback.

However, we do believe that there is a place for alpha versions to be made available to a larger audience, our community. Most major open source projects have a concept of public alpha versions. I encourage you to check out apache.org. Do a search for alpha and you will find alpha version for download for many of its projects.

I strongly disagree with the dumb statement. It is the wrong way to look at this challenge. While we need to be able to deploy alpha versions, we need a way of better communicating with our users right there on this downloads page.
We want to leverage joomlacode.org as a central hub for our SVN and software downloads. It comes with some limitations that we have not yet overcome. If anything it is our fault for not having a better separation between Alpha and Stable releases on that very same downloads page.

What we really need is help to come up with smarter ways on how to leverage joomlacode.org for downloads so that it is clear to every single visitor what they are getting by downloading a particular package.

The easiest thing would be to modify that page and insert custom formatted text and colors around the various version sections. Unfortunately that's not a supported option. As such we need to look into alternatives.

Sure we could offer our own fancy download packages and that problem would go away as quickly as it came. But we too want to be part of a larger community and as such want to leverage joomlacode.org for that purpose.

Yes - we are all learning. The day we stop doing that will make our work meaningless.

I hope I was able to explain another side to the story.

Have a great day!

fxstein

For your amusement:

Eh..

I don't know, if you download something that says "do not use this for production purposes" and do so anyway, then you have to deal with the results.

Personally, I'd rather have the ability to download an alpha release given the opportunity to do so, because if there is something critical in it that I need I'd love to have the option to have it.

In this case, I downloaded and installed 1.09. I'm content with it. I haven't yet looked at the alpha version, and I probably won't look at the beta version either unless it has something I really want.

I realize there are some people who are going to download an alpha release to their detriment and be upset, but I think in the end, those people help kunena move forward because using alpha in a production environment probably generates better bug reports. They'll learn not to do that kind of thing again of course.