Due: Tuesday, May 18, by 5:00pm
Turnin:
A beta release is an opportunity to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of your system.
Recall that each team is acting as the customer for another team. (And you should be learning from that team's successes and failures!) As the customer, you have been asked to provide the vendor with some user feedback on an early release of the product. You will provide this feedback by running tests.
The testing serves three purposes:
Please perform the following testing for that team's software.
(If the software is well-packaged, then #1 and #3 should take very little time. If you have problems with #1 that prevent you from proceeding to #2 (or problems in #3), then contact the vendor to fix the problem. In other words, it is important to start early on this assignment.)
Report any problems that you encounter, following the project's bug-reporting instructions. Be sure to provide enough information to enable the developers to reproduce the problem. You do not need to speculate as to the root cause. An incomplete list of reportable bugs includes the following:
As with any testing, you should focus on the most important issues. (You may report small problems, too, but not at the expense of the big ones.)
Do not test parts of the system that are documented as not yet working. (However, by the release of a beta, significant functionality should be present, and it should be possible to use the software in a useful, even if limited, way. If that isn't the case, then the beta release was a failure and you should so indicate in your assessment.) Do not report duplicates of ones that already appear in the bug tracking system.
There is really no end to how much time you can spend on testing. Please allow yourselves 6-8 person hours collectively to conduct your testing and report your findings. You must spread the testing across at least three members of your team in an organized fashion.
Finally, after you have finished, send a brief email with subject line “Beta evaluation for project“ (with project properly filled in, duh) that includes:
You will be graded on the quality and thoroughness of the feedback you provide. As with all CSE403 assignments, this is a team assignment, with all members responsible for work. No matter how many people work on it, all team members will be graded on the result.
A requirement for all teams: When your team resolves a bug, you must notify the person who initially reported it. (This happens automatically with most bug tracking systems.)