Beta testing is a pivotal phase in the software development lifecycle, offering companies invaluable insights into their product’s performance, usability, and market fit. However, missteps during this phase can derail even the most promising products. Let’s delve into the top five mistakes companies often make during beta testing and how to avoid them, supported by real-world examples and expert opinions.
Here’s what you need to avoid:
- Don’t launch your test without doing basic sanity checks
- Don’t go into it without the desire to improve your product
- Don’t test with the wrong beta testers or give the wrong incentives
- Don’t recruit too few or too many beta testers
- Don’t seek only positive feedback and cheerleaders
1. Failing to do sanity tests for your most basic features.
Jumping straight into beta testing without validating that your latest build actually works is a recipe for disaster.
If your app requires taking pictures, but crashes every time someone clicks the button to snap a picture, why are you wasting your time and money on beta testing?!
Set up an internal testing program with your team:
Alpha testing can be done internally to help identify and rectify major bugs and issues before exposing the product to external users. This has been a lesson learned by many in the past, and it’s especially true if you are hoping to get user experience or usability feedback. If your app just doesn’t work, the rest of your feedback is basically meaningless!
Google emphasizes the importance of internal testing:
“Dogfooding is an important part of our test process. Test teams do their best to find problems before dogfooding, but we all know that testing by dedicated testers only goes so far.” – Inc.com
Next, you need to ensure every build goes through a sanity test prior to sending it out to testers
It doesn’t matter if your developers just tweaked one line of code. If something changed in the code, it’s possible it broke the entire app. Before sending out a product to external testers for the purpose of testing or user research, ensure your team has personally tested all the major product features for that exact build. It doesn’t matter if you’ve tested it 1,000 times before, it needs to be tested again from scratch.
How do you avoid this mistake?
Conduct thorough internal testing (alpha phase) to test your product internally before testing externally. Never test a build with testers that your team hasn’t personally tested and validated that the core features work.
2. Don’t go into it without the desire to improve your product
Your goal for testing should be research-related. You should be focused on collecting user feedback and/or data, and resolving issues that ultimately allow you to improve your product or validate that your product is ready for launch. You can have secondary goals, yes. For example, the desire to collect testimonials or reviews you can use for marketing reasons, or beginning to build your user base.
You should have a clear goal about what you plan to accomplish. Without a clear goal and plan for testing, beta testing can become chaotic and difficult to analyze. A lack of structure leads to fragmented or vague feedback that doesn’t help the product team make informed decisions.
How do you avoid this mistake?
Go into it with specific research-related goals. For example: to learn from users so you can improve your product, or to validate that your product is ready for launch. Ideally, you should be OK with either answer – e.g. “No, our product is not ready for launch. We need to either improve it or kill it before we waste millions on marketing.”
3. Don’t Test with the Wrong Beta Testers
Selecting testers who don’t reflect your target market can result in misleading feedback. For instance, many early-stage apps attract tech enthusiasts during open beta—but if your target audience is mainstream users, this can cause skewed insights. Mismatched testers often test differently and expect features your actual users won’t need.
Make sure you’re giving the right incentives that align with your target audience demographics and what you’re asking of testers. For example, if you’re recruiting a specialized professional audience, you need to offer meaningful rewards – you aren’t going to recruit people that make 150K to spend an hour testing for a $15 reward! Also, if your test process is complex, difficult, or just not fun – that matters. You’ll need to offer a higher incentive to get quality participation.
How do you avoid this mistake?
Recruit a tester pool that mirrors your intended user base. Tools like BetaTesting allow you to target and screen testers based on hundreds of criteria (demographic, devices, locations, interests, and many others) to ensure that feedback aligns with your customer segment. Ensure that you’re providing meaningful incentives.
4. Don’t Recruit Too Few or Too Many Beta Testers.
Having too few testers means limited insights and edge-case technical issues will be missed. Conversely, having too many testers is not a great use of resources. It costs more, and there are diminishing returns. At a certain point, you’ll see repetitive feedback that doesn’t add additional value.Too many testers can also overwhelm your team, making feedback difficult to analyze or prioritize insights.
How do you avoid this mistake?
For most tests, focus on iterative testing with groups of 5-100 testers at a time. Beta testing is about connecting with your users, learning, and continuously improving your product. When do you need more? If your goal is real-world load testing or data collection, those are cases where you may need more testers. But in that case, your team (e.g. engineers or data scientists) should be telling you exactly how many people they need and for what reason. It shouldn’t be because you read somewhere that it’s good to have 5,000 testers.
5. Don’t seek only positive feedback and cheerleaders
Negative feedback hurts. After pouring your heart and soul into building a product, negative feedback can feel like a personal attack. Positive feedback is encouraging, and gives us energy and hope that we’re on the right path! So, it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeking out positive feedback and discounting negative feedback.
In reality, it’s the negative feedback that is often most helpful. In general, people have a bias to mask their negative thoughts or hide them altogether. So when you get negative feedback. even when it’s delivered poorly, it’s critical to pay attention. This doesn’t mean that every piece of feedback is valid or that you need to build every feature that’s requested. But you should understand what you can improve, even if you choose not to prioritize it. You should understand why that specific person felt that way, even if you decide it’s not important.
The worst behavior pattern that we see: Seeking positive feedback and validation and discounting or excluding negative feedback. This is a mental/phycological weakness that will not lead to good things.
How do you avoid this mistake?
View negative feedback as an opportunity to learn and improve your product. Most people won’t tell you how they feel. Perhaps this is a good chance to improve something that you’ve always known was a weakness or a problem.
Conclusion
Avoiding these common pitfalls can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your beta testing phase, leading to a more refined product and successful launch. By conducting thorough alpha testing, planning meticulously, selecting appropriate testers, managing tester numbers wisely, and keeping testers engaged, companies can leverage beta testing to its fullest potential.
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