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PepiMK
2007-07-07, 16:51
I still need to give some thoughts for a text to publish on the website, but in a few words, I'll aready announce it here, since you might already have seen it anyway ;)

Managing beta progress, bug reports, feature requests etc. is not an easy thing; right now we usually add bugs to an internal bugtracker. This doesn't give our users enough feedback on what actually happens with their problems and wishes though - we want to make all that a bit more transparent. For that reason, we've added a bug & feature request tracking addon to the forum; you will notice new sub-items e.g. on the Spybot-S&D and RunAlyzer forums (others should follow).

Right now, everyone can report bugs there, but please, try to be very exact in reporting things there. This feature is NOT intended as a subforum to just post, but as something that takes a few minutes to look up existing posts on a topic, and make a descriptive report so that we don't have to close it down because of repeatedly the same things ;)

Well, here is the link (http://forums.spybot.info/project.php?projectid=1), but of course you can also get there just by going into the main Spybot-S&D forum, where it's visible between the sub-forums ;)

wk357mag
2007-07-07, 18:06
awesome work here. This should help out alot for future. But will require alot of work on you and the forum editiors

PepiMK
2007-07-15, 14:55
Since the first one started to write support requests there, I had to remove the new-issue permission for the standard forum user group :sad:
Maybe I should create a "beta tester" group for people who know how to write proper reports ;)

wk357mag
2007-07-15, 19:39
yeah, I have been involved with beta testing else where, there is good and bad things to this, but over all its worked out well having a BETA portion of the forum, with only select person (your beta approved testers) having access to that folder to read and write. This way you can release more beta and not worry about the public getting them and using to much bandwidth, with multiple smaller updates, that could happen 1-2 times a week.

Bad side is, you will get requests from peeps to do this, but they dont really help out much, just there to get more info and updates. But even these people are installing and if something major happens with their rig, they will let you know.

So consider changing the current beta forum to select users only, pick your beta team members and then make then a ICON that they can use in the forum, to give them alittle prestiage. "SpyBot Beta Team" 100% volunteer group of peeps. Then later just post all the fixxes that you have made, to inform the public.

As beta testing is coming to a close, you can then do a RELEASE CANIDATE, which is really just more beta testing, but on a larger scale. Most issues will have been found and fixxed prior to that and by doing 1-2 "RC's" you can make sure your FINAL is top quality.

A closed Beta Forum also allows you to 'let your hair down' so to speak, so you wont have to be so professional, as you would with the public forums. Allows you to be more a reader there as you try to ID areas of concern to the project.

Anyway, this has worked before else where, so it should work here. BTW, I used to be a Beta team member at NFHQ forum, were we helped nVidia debugg their drivers on the nForce platform. This was back in the early days of nForce. But I still hold a Moderator Tag in the forum, as I was one of the first peeps to be a memeber there and be a MOD and be a BETA Team member, ect.