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How Xitron is using Glassboard to distribute and manage a beta

If you’re in software development, you’ve probably had to manage a beta at some point (although I must admit, in my own early days of coding I never did a whole lot of testing). There are needs of both the developers and the customer that can’t always be fulfilled via email. What software developers need is something that enables them to:

1. Distribute a beta privately to the customer

2. Provide an easy means for the customer to provide feedback

3. Route issues and questions to the right people (sales? support? etc.)

Shawn Platkus, a senior software developer at Xitron, saw Glassboard as a means to do all this. Here is what he had to say about using Glassboard for beta testing:

When I release a new beta version to the customer, I simply post a thread in Glassboard stating the version and date that the product was delivered and include the download link to the version.

Our customer had a few initial hurdles getting the software up and running, and he posted his questions along with a screenshot to our board and I was able to respond immediately and relay the solution to him within minutes.

He then goes on:

Another win for me with using Glassboard is that I invited the sales rep for this customer to be on our Glassboard board. The customer posted in a comment that he would like to have two additional licenses of our product so that a couple of his employees could test the product on their workstations. As the developer, I have no way of generating licenses or making the decision to even allow him to have extra licenses. Getting this accomplished through email would have taken a lot of my time routing emails to the right places and then following up on the process. However with our sales rep on our Glassboard board, he saw the message from our customer before I did and responded that he would handle getting him the extra licenses to use.

So far Glassboard has been all win for me in managing this beta process. One issue I hit almost immediately was the 1000 character limit, but then the next day I saw a post where the limit was increased to 10,000 characters[Shh! Don't tell anyone, but that's the new character limit in the web app]. That’s going to be plenty for bug reports and feedback, so the one hurdle I had with using Glassboard for this has already been resolved.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg