Thoughts on beta testing? Opinions?

Hey Crew,

The first round of testing, Alpha testing for lack of a better word, is planning to be a closed test. Meaning a limited number of testers and a limited distribution of code. That would be mostly to keep the coordinating effort low. It takes time to train people up on the new commands, and to get good feedback on bugs etc.

My question concerns the beta testing stage. After we have found and removed 80% of the bugs we will be down to the "play and adjust" stage. Torn Stars never really made it that far. What I am considering (and would like your thoughts on) is the idea of an Open beta test. Meaning that we post the mod and allow anyone to download it.

I have a few reasons for doing this. The main one is that Unstable Space, even in a beta condition, has far fewer bugs than Torn Stars. Essentially, everyone playing Torn Stars and asking questions, could be having a much more pleasant experience playing Unstable Space.

Secondly, it was feedback on Torn Stars that improve Unstable Space so much. And we deny ourselves that feedback if the beta is closed.

I think it would still be nice to have a more limited group of people who were willing to contribute more time to become "offical" beta testers. Those people would be tasked with testing more specifically. And they would have access to the debug features needed to speed the game along.

What do you think of the idea?

A few words from a satisfied "customer".
The open-beta idea is absolutely right to me , you can have a larger information base , and if you include a brief HOW TO on reporting bugs , you'll probably get a better feedback from casual game testers . Crappy reports like "Something went wrong when I did something in a system I don't remember" are usually 2 lines long and really quick to get rid of.
Closed beta is for commercial software , a way not to loose their customers' trust , but US is something different , and everyone who got benefit (FUN FUN FUN) from it , can do nothing but praise all the efforts the dev team put into this mod , that is also free .
Keep up the good work .

For a mod project like this I think an Open Beta is the way to go. If we have ALL people able to report bugs in RoundUp is a different question that we will need to decide on. The tasked beta testers will definitely need to report clear and well defined bugs with supporting screen shots and save files into RoundUp.

Cheers.