Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 06:53:07 09/09/00
Go up one level in this thread
On September 09, 2000 at 09:11:27, Uri Blass wrote: >I understand now that in most of the cases the beta testers get the commercial >version of the program that they test so they get some payment. >When I replied the opinion poll question I thought only about getting the beta >version without getting the commercial version. > >I think that it is better to pay them money for their job when they will have to >buy the package of beta+ commercial version. >The reason for it is that not all the beta testers do the same job and I think >that it is not correct to give the same payement for different jobs. What a weird poll. Betatesters deliver very few comments usual that's useful for a programmer. Most things i see when i am myself following games of DIEP. If i'd pay for that then i'd not be only wasting money, but also i would be bankrupt within days. Handing out versions (beta or whatever) is something different. You can't get comment back without people having your program! Over the years i've had with DIEP about 100 betatesters or so, but only a very few, usually those who ran/run it at the internet, have delivered good comments on it. Usual someone offers to 'betatest' in order to get a version of a program. Right now i'm spreading the winboard version of DIEP quite easily around, and so far the useful info i get back is real pathetic. If a betatester concludes that there sucks something bigtime in diep's eval because it plays g4? then i'm already real happy. As i can fix *something* then. considering the thousands of fixes i do a year, that's only 0.001 part of the fixes at most. Most comment is like: "diep sucks in closed positions". Well i knew that already! The best 'bugfixes' are comments usual from other programmers, like the comment of Steffen recently. Also Bob has helped me over the years bigtime, especially when talking about the parallellisation of DIEP. There are exceptions of course on this betatester picture, who *do* regurarly give useful comments. It's hard to find such betatesters. Even harder as that is to find people who want to auto232 play your program against other programs like Shredder, Fritz & others. Just 1 or 2 games is not what i mean then. Someone who wants to run DIEP at an auto232 player and send me back results of the auto232 player can ring me any time of the day! >Here is an example. >Suppose beta testers are asked to give games from some known positions against >known opponents at 1 hour/game time control. >Suppose one of them gives 100 games and another one gives only 10 games(nobody >of them gives more information). > >I think that the tester who gave 100 games should get better payment. Oh well. What to do with 10000 games of 1 0 at the icc? Also what if 90 of those 100 games are exaclty the same bookline? Secondly, what if those games are all played with an older version, despite you sending already a new version to the betatester? Or what if you already fixed the bug, or what if the 'bug' is not a bug but a feature which is interpreted wrong? Now we didn't talk about the many silly reports, which i don't mind as i'm happy that there is a *small* chance that such a report can be good. The average betatester doesn't even have 2000 rating or something, and even if it's 2200 then still this means he's tactical insane compared to the program, so the average 'this went wrong' report needs at least to be carefully checked whether it's true in advance. Apart from that see the many posts of mate in 2 or 4 or something here at icc. I don't care whether DIEP solves a mate in 4 in 0.001 or 0.01 seconds or in 2 seconds. It's just not interesting! >If you tell all the testers to give the same computer time you cannot use some >testers who have less time and cannot use efficiently some testers who have more >computer time to give(because they have more computers or because their >computers are not busy in other tasks). if i'd had to pay a betatester i would sign a contract and i would assume he'd be 12 hours a day busy testing my program. So i would expect daily reports then with things being wrong. Because if i do somethign like that myself with my own program, then each 5 minutes i remember something that's wrong in the program! Greetings, Vincent >Uri
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