

Jeff Voegel: Beta Testers - Getting Them, Keeping Them - ChrisXYZ
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/08/beta-testers-getting-them-keeping-them.html

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mgenzel
A few points:

a) by asking people to sign an NDA before beta testing, you're slamming a door
in the face of the overwhelming majority of potential testers. If you want to
ensure a purely CYA legal policy, just stick in TOS as they sign in to test
(that won't turn off most since most don't read TOS)

b) while it's true that you are unlikely to find someone who'll look, test out
everything, and summarize in constructive bullet points, it's missing the
point a bit. Your ultimate goal should be to find large number of warm bodies
(ideally, from target audience) to throw at your app and then have
infrastructure & discipline in place to observe them and make inferences. Also
I think we need to differentiate between alpha and beta testing, they require
different approaches (and I suspect that the author is talking about what I
would call alpha: pre-functional still secretive app).

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frosty
this might work for games but for boring things like enterprise software
domain, whats the ideal way to find testers and how much should i pay them?

have any of tried out on freelance or amazon turk etc?

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dflock
It sounds like a lot of this advice would work well for non-games software
too. I would imagine that it will be harder to get testers initially, but once
you do, the rest of the advice sounds very cogent.

