I really must say that even though I haven’t been a Technical Beta Tester for Microsoft for very long (only since Office 2003/Server 2003, my first two), I’m really disappointed with the Windows 7 Technical Beta Program.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel privileged to have been invited to it, however I really have to wonder what the point is. Most of the bugs that testers submit, myself included, are quickly closed as ‘Won’t Fix’, and the ones that are have instructions to ‘verify in the next build’. But honestly, how are we supposed to do this when we were only given two builds, the first of which was months old, and both of which were available to the public only a few days later.
Yes, Technical Beta Testers are given focus scenarios and surveys and such, however when most of the feedback seems to go largely unheeded, it raises a lot of questions as to why. Why test a build which is at least 160 builds behind, when the bugs you’re uncovering are likely to already be fixed, or have no way to verify they’ve actually been fixed.
Still, though, I continue on – I have two machines still running RC build 7100. I’ve resisted the urge to go for ‘leaked’ RTM-branch builds that are floating around various Torrent sites, however I can’t help but hope that come time to test Windows 8 (if I’m lucky enough to be invited to that beta), Microsoft will have listened to their testers and provide more builds for us to give feedback on.
In closing, I’ll leave you with a link to “Windows 7 Nightmares“. I don’t know who the author is, suffice to say he’s also a Technical Beta Tester, and he’s a little on the extreme side from time-to-time, however he definitely has some interesting insight in to the Beta Testing Process (read the posts from oldest to newest for the best understanding).
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