The Importance of Quality over Quantity
Many Betabounders associate beta testing with bug hunting – the more issues you find wrong with a product, the better! But Betabound isn’t about bug hunting. Our team of Test Managers also cares about your likes, dislikes, and overall impressions of a tech product. To paint that picture, we request testers submit forms of feedback like discussion posts, bug reports, surveys, feature requests, etc. Bug reports are important, but they’re only a couple brushstrokes of painting a much more complete picture of overall customer acceptance.
Let’s examine what a bug report actually is. A bug report is feedback provided by a beta tester that details an unexpected failure or defect in the product. The report itself typically includes a title, description, steps to reproduce, severity, category, and related file attachments.
If you were a product developer, which would you prefer: 500 bug reports or 500 pieces of feedback that included bug reports, discussion posts, surveys, etc.? Unlike other beta testing communities, we believe in full spectrum testing. Our team doesn’t just care about what is physically wrong with a tech product (which bug reports resolve), but how a product makes you feel emotionally too. For example, yes — your smart TV may not sync to your iPhone, but do you enjoy using the product that other 99% of the time? If no, then what could the product developers do to improve your experience with their smart TV? These are the sorts of questions our clients prefer our testers to answer.
Within Betabound, we prefer quality over quantity. Anyone can heat seek bugs within a beta product, but it takes a thoughtful tester to answer bigger picture questions. Our clients appreciate Betabounders that take the time to offer feature suggestions, share their use-case experiences, dream up new versions of a product, and explain the good and the bad of a specific tech product. Being so close to their products, our clients appreciate our testers’ ability to help them step back and look at the big picture.
Our Test Managers encourage Betabounders to focus on quality feedback rather than quantity of submissions. It’s great to be active within our projects, but it’s even better to share meaningful insights about a product. Those pieces of high-quality, thoughtful feedback are the ones that could shape a product’s final development, and are therefore, the responses we hope testers will focus on if they’re interested in truly helping a team improve their final design.
Learn about the types of feedback you’ll need to submit as a tester!