My eight year old today asked me why the iKollect website has the word “Beta” at the top. I was explaining to her how the whole software release cycle works when it dawned on me that maybe I shouldn’t be in Beta anymore. So my eight year old and I reviewed the specifics:

• There hasn’t been a new bug reported in I don’t know how long
• I’ve frozen my code as of that last release
• I have been providing full support for the application for a long time now.

So why am I still in Beta?
In building client-server applications, the alpha /beta /release-candidate stages were so much more obvious to me. It was obvious when an app was in beta, because only my beta testers would have a copy. But web apps are new for me so I need to change this way of thinking a bit. Also, I think I’ve gotten so used to seeing releases of some web applications which seem to stay in Beta forever (like Gmail), that I started ignoring the Beta tag on my own site. Whoops! So as of this evening, iKollect is out of Beta. I suppose I should be celebrating or something, but I’m up to my eyeballs in marketing stuff tonight…so I guess I’ll party later!

Tags: ikollect beta