Release Designations
Back in the old days, it was extremely common to buy software that just had a plain old version number. You know, "Windows 3.1", "WordPerfect 5", etc. If you got your hands on a beta copy of a piece of software it meant you were usually a highly-valued customer, a paid tester, or your brother-in-law worked for the company.
These days, regular version numbers are a rarity. Everything’s beta this and beta that. Seems nobody really knows what those designations mean anymore. If they do know what they mean, the formal definitions are thrown out in favour of the perceived marketing advantages of seeming more "Web 2.0." Sometimes I wish we could go back to the old days, when these things still meant something.
Alpha
Alpha used to mean the first draft. An alpha release usually had big swaths of functionality missing. Placeholders instead of features. It might crash your machine. It might not do anything useful. It might steal your cows and your daughters. It was meant largely as a proof of concept, to get feedback on the general direction on the features for the next release of the software. This is a great time to let the programmers know when they have completely missed the boat, because there’s still plenty of time to make substantial changes.
Beta
Beta, to me, means feature complete. A beta doesn’t indicate any particular level of quality. It does mean that the placeholders have been replaced with features and, assuming it doesn’t crash, you can do everything with the beta that you will be able to do in the final release. It’s missing help files and polish. You’d be silly to run it in production because it may very well destroy your data. But it is feature complete. If the feature is not in the beta, it won’t be in the production system.
Release Candidate (RC)
This designation ought to be the easiest to understand, as it’s the first one that’s not a Greek letter. The release candidate should be just that. Except for the version number and the license agreement, this is finished software. It has passed all of the internal quality bars and the development team considers it ready for production use. This stage is a final check to see if anything has been missed, quality-wise. If nothing is found, you change the license agreement and version number and ship the product.
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