Do you take part in LabVIEW betas?

[REM1]

Greetings,

Do you take part in betas?  What could we do to entice you to be even more active than you already are?

I'm not promising that anything will change as a result of your answer but...who knows?

[TroyK]

Yes...well at least I intended to. I got the software and everything but I just didn't have time to run my apps and do some developing with it.

Maybe if you gave away some free NI goodies for each unique bug reported there would be more motivation to try and break the BETA.

[Spectre_Dave]

Robert

I do participate in some Betas but I generally do not get to spend a lot of time on them do to work constraints.

[Ben]

---

REM1 wrote:

...  What could we do to entice you to be even more active than you already are?

...

---

Easy!

1) Get rid of that verbage in the BETA EULA that reads something to the effect "..... so code at your own risk."

2) Agree to compensate my company for any lost time due to a bug in the BETA.

Ben

[altenbach]

I've been on every beta since probably early this century (6i?) and I think it is a great opportunity to be closer to the developers and give more direct feedback.

Beta testers have the power to comment on and help improve already excellent new ideas while at the same time help prevent the stinkers from ever being released to the public. 😄 That's a good thing!

I tend to mostly develop in betas if possible and "save for previous" usually worked well enough to be able to release stuff in the desired public version when needed. Beta testing requires some discipline to keep backups of everything. We also need to always think before posting an example in the forum to prevent accidental posting of a VI in a beta version (which nobody would be able to open and would break the NDA).

All this works well because I am a "one man operation" here and I am in academia. I understand that things would be much more complicated if mutiple programmers work on a commercial project.

[tst]

I did participate in a few betas, but I always did it at home. I usually did it to be able to keep up with the new versions even though I only used 7.0 at work. Using the beta at home meant that I didn't really get a chance to stress test it and the number of bugs I submitted was usually pretty low. For the current SE tools beta, I didn't even find the time to download the tools, only to watch the tutorials.

Unfortunately, it looks like the only way I could seriously test a beta was if it had a feature or bug fix I needed or if we were planning on upgrading to that version. Maybe now that we're using 8.6 I will be able to test new betas better, but I'm not sure.

[FraggerFox]

The thing I wont take part in LV betas is because of my ever loosing faith in LabVIEW. Being a CLAD and having 6 months exp(with surity of much better knowledge than my TL), I work for a company which cant even fulfill my living expense 😞

 I always hoped LabVIEW would change my career path to new heights 😞

[RobCole]

We always try the LabVIEW Betas here at work. The first thing we do is check if there is anything in the new version that would impact/help with existing or planned projects. Usually, we'll load complex projects into the new version to see what (if anything) breaks or if there are any upgrade difficulties (when we went from 6.1 to 7.1, we had MAJOR rework but there were new features we wanted).

So that's the first thing with a Beta: make sure there is a good list of what's changed and what's been added/removed. That's what gets us looking at the new version.

     Rob

[Ray.R]

Participated in a couple of betas.  Unfortunatelty, time doesn't allow to participate in all of them.

[waldemar.hersacher]

I participated in some of the betas. I have an application which uses some of the classic technologies. It don't use all things introduced since LV 8 because it is a LV 7.1.1 app. The advantage is I can use this app without any drivers and hardware. This allows me to do the beta test at home since my company will not take this as hours of work.