A Complete Understanding Of ~ Beta Testing & Alpha Testing

Last updated on September 20th, 2023 at 07:09 am

After investing months of time & energy in app development and design, the app still fails because of technical errors. It lets you and your users down with lots of irks and questions. Hence, it is essential to understand why users don’t use your app. Is it due to its lack of innovation or proper execution? Or is it because of bugs and errors? There could be any reason that would lead to your app’s failure in the real world.

However, the savior from this situation can be through alpha & beta testing. Before the alpha testing, the app must be tested by many users to give the best user experience after the launch. Beta testing is a necessary process of app development referred to as testing.

Let’s learn in detail what alpha and beta testing are before we jump to each other’s pros and cons.

Define Beta testing

The App beta testing means testing the app before the deployment by targeting some users to discover bugs or glitches in the app to avoid crashes while using the app, fix performance issues, and add or remove new features to eliminate everything that does not work correctly.

Beta testers are a bunch of users from targeted users to provide feedback from their viewpoint. Often, businesses invest their time, money, and energy in developing & creating a visually attractive app but do not wait for enough to perform beta testing and make huge mistakes. Beta testing is significant in enhancing the app and eliminating all the bugs related to the app.

Define Alpha Testing

This is testing performed primarily by the in-house software & teams. Alpha testing is the last testing conducted by the test teams at the development site after the acceptance testing and before launching the beta test software. Possible users of the app can even conduct alpha testing. However, this is still the form of in-house acceptance testing.

Pros & Cons Of Beta & Alpha Testing

Advantages of Beta Testing

Verify your mobile app idea

Undoubtedly your mobile app idea is unique and will bring the desired outcomes, but it is no imperative that you get the same outcomes after the app deployment. Hence, to validate your app idea & its features, the beta testers help a group of users to provide their precious feedback to alter, add, or remove the features & functionalities to create a perfect app.

Evaluate quality

After identifying the user’s demand & their experience from the user’s viewpoint help in creating the app that perfectly integrates with the users’ expectations. The beta testing helps in preserving the balance between the app’s experience & the features.

Check usability

The app usability score differs as per the users. The beta app tester reviews help the app development team plentiful in making the app perfect.

Evaluate the app’s performance

The in-house team cannot determine the app’s response in different environments & on a range of devices, but beta testers can. They will give you the app’s accurate analysis of what they experience while using the app. This will help to know the app’s performance on different devices in various geographies with multiple connectivity zones.

Save time & energy

It is truly tough to build an app for a business without any failure. To save your app from failure, it is better to verify and protect your app from huge damage before entering the market. With beta testing, developers can fix any issues in the app easily and rapidly before the app launch.

Disadvantages of Beta Testing

• The bug reporting of the recognized bugs is not proper & systematic.
• The testing & test environment is not well-defined & under the control of the development team. It is often difficult to reproduce the bugs as the testing environment varies from user to user.
• There are many duplicate bugs in beta testing.

Advantages of Alpha Testing

Achieve full and detailed testing

Alpha testing uses black-box & white-box testing. The black box testing will examine the system’s inputs & output functionality at a top level. In comparison, the white box testing looks at the system’s internal structure & design. This is essential to verify the product’s input & output flows for all needed & likely scenarios.

Enhanced software quality

Here, the system is examined in a simulated environment, similar to the environment it will be used. This creates real-life testing conditions, trying to empathize with users. Even if the software is under beta testing, the team will get reviews from genuine users. And eventually, all of this will lead to better product quality.

Insights into usability & reliability

Alpha testing renders the opportunity to understand how the system will act when it is released to the end-users. The product team can measure the system’s performance & acquire an idea of its usability & reliability way ahead. Such insights will help the product team to make an apt decision on future improvements as well.

Reduced re-work & delivery time

This testing enables the testing team to recognize potential production problems beforehand. This helps the development team to address the likely production problems and repair them before launch. This lessens the development re-work & delivery time of later launches.

Disadvantages of Alpha Testing

Alpha testing calls for a longer test execution time.

The full product will be tested at a high level & deeply in alpha testing, using the different black box & white-box techniques. Hence, the test execution cycle takes a long time to finish. The testing cycle duration depends on the product features & and defects revealed during the testing.

The Bottom Line

This article clearly shows how important it is to perform beta and alpha testing before launching your app into the market. User satisfaction is what matters, and beta testing helps in collecting user feedback before launching the app. Therefore, mobile app testing is crucial for the mobile app development process to ensure the app is full of excellent functions & features. The testing ensures that the app is bug and error-free, delivers the best user experience, and lessens the risk of failure.