Blog - Alpha and Beta Testing

You've heard us say it before - we eat our own dog food. Starting this past December, every Monday we now run the latest unreleased build of Rock on several of our own sites including rockrms.com because we'd rather encounter a bug before you do. But we also understand that we might not catch everything so we don't stop there.

Once we're ready to release a new version of Rock, we package it and send it to our alpha update server. This gives our small group of community alpha testers a chance to perform the update on their test systems and report any issues they encounter. Ideally we'd like to have this group kicking it hard for several weeks before we proceed to the next stage: beta testing.

Once we've gotten the all-clear from the alpha testers, we send a final release candidate package to our beta update server. Once there, a larger community of beta testers can then perform the update against their own systems. Beta testers (you know who you are and we are so greatful for you) play a vital role since they're the final level of defense before a Rock update is released to the entire world. These are the folks who have a solid understanding of their environments and have the skills to quickly restore if they encounter anything too serious for them to deal with. We would love to see more involvement by Rock community members in this area.

If you want to join the beta team and find out when a beta release is ready, you can subscribe to our beta tester group now.

Read more about alpha and beta testers on our Get Involved page.