| By David Abramowski | Article Rating: |
|
| April 26, 2009 11:13 AM EDT | Reads: |
708 |
Don’t underestimate the power of beta testing to a wide range of people. Consider it collaborative development. Open your software to a broad range of people inside and outside of your target market and you’ll be amazed at what you get back from them.
A perfect example is my current project MioWorks.com. We opened up for public beta testing a couple weeks ago. In that time we have been getting amazing feedback that has allowed us to direct our development resources to the must have features of a target set of users.
Now you can’t just run off and implement every feature that is throw at you by the beta group. But you can listen to them as a whole and look for trends and commonalities. For us, we knew that we needed to implement ways to improve data manipulation and the feedback gave us the exact path to take. As we complete the development and roll it out, we are extremely confident that this effort will be well received by our beta group.
So open yourself up to critique and criticism early in the process. You may also want to adopt some not-so-traditional approaches by using social media. We encourage our beta group to use Twitter to spout off feature needs and questions in real time - all they have to do is respond @Mioworks and we collect that data and use it in our analysis and product planning.
In the end, no matter how you do it, building software should be a collaborative process that takes into account your target market.
Read the original blog entry...
Published April 26, 2009 Reads 708
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By David Abramowski
David Abramowski is CEO of Mio Partnerz LLC, a new startup in Portland building a SaaS application taking advantage of cloud computing. Formerly, David was the CEO of MorphLabs where he led the team to build one of the first multi-environment platform as a service offerings on top of Amazon Web Services. Prior to joining Morph Labs, he was a Director of Product Marketing for Symantec, where he was responsible for introducing and enabling acquired endpoint technologies to Symantec's worldwide sales and partner organizations. Follow David's tweets at http://www.twitter.com/dabramowski
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Starts Today
- Yahoo! to Keynote 4th Cloud Expo: Accelerating Innovation with Cloud Computing
- Exclusive Q&A with Rich Marcello - Unisys President, Systems & Technology
- The Economics of Cloud Computing Analyzed
- Commercial vs Federal Cloud Computing
- An Interview with Federal CIO Nominee Vivek Kundra
- Deputy CIO of the CIA to Keynote 1st Annual GovIT Expo
- CIA was Headed to an Enterprise Cloud All Along: Jill Tummler Singer
- 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo: Themes & Topics
- Industry Experts Discuss the State of Cloud Computing
- Akamai Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Starts Today
- Cloud CEOs, CTOs & SVPs to Speak at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo
- Yahoo! Named “Platinum Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo
- Yahoo! to Keynote 4th Cloud Expo: Accelerating Innovation with Cloud Computing
- SYS-CON.TV: Cloud Computing Expo Power Panel
- Exclusive Q&A with Rich Marcello - Unisys President, Systems & Technology
- Unisys Named “Platinum Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo
- The Economics of Cloud Computing Analyzed
- Commercial vs Federal Cloud Computing
- An Interview with Federal CIO Nominee Vivek Kundra
- 1st Annual GovIT Expo: Letter from the Technical Chair
- Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- SOA 2 Point Oh No!
- The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Cloud Computing Expo Europe 2009 in Prague: Themes & Topics
- IBM's Got Its Head in the Clouds
- Cloud Computing Expo 2009 West: Call for Papers Now Closed
- Red Hat Named "Platinum Sponsor" of Virtualization Conference & Expo
- As Google's SaaS Assault Begins, Move Over Microsoft Office?
- From Enterprise to Cloud, Virtualization Today on SYS-CON.TV
- Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing


































