Finally we reached the point where our application has taken such a form that we can start to present it to the stakeholders and give it out to our testers. And this could be a good time to talk about our application’s release process. Although we still have a quite long way to go before we release the application to open public, however at this stage we already released our application for testers on the Google Play Store. To make sure that the application to general audience arrives stable, bug-free and with excellent user experience we follow the well known Software release cycle described here. It means that with every release we will open our application to the more wider public. And using Google Play Store release tracks as application distribution channels helps us to follow software release cycle best practices. There are following release tracks on Google Play Store:
- Internal test track
- Closed track (Alpha closed)
- Open track (Beta open)
- Production track
In each of these release tracks we can roll-out several versions of our application. One can start from any of the release tracks. Sometimes pre-alpha versions are useful to send to testers directly by e-mail or distribute over private distribution channels, and only on alpha or beta phase start to roll-out an application to Google Play Store, but since Google Play Store has a special track (Internal test track) for pre-alpha versions, we decided to roll-out our application as soon as we had a working application with enough features. The main advantage of distributing application over Google Play Store is the ease of installation and update, which we really missed when we had to download the application’s latest version manually.
At this phase only our company QA (Quality Assurance) people have access to the application on Google Play Store. Our QA team have worked together with developers and the business idea authors at application’s design stage and set up application acceptance requirements. And now when they have a real app at their hands they can make sure the application is not only working but works according the previously set requirements. Once our testers will make sure that our application is stable, bug-free and works according the requirements we will make our application available to the small group of trusted people outside our team. For this purpose the closed alpha release will be used. Entering this phase we don’t expect all features be present in our app, but a user should be able to perform the main actions and fulfill most of the use cases. The main purpose of this release is to get a quick feedback from real users who see the application first time and see if there is anything our team has missed on earlier stages of application development. As a communication channel on this stage will be used dedicated email box. When there won’t be any complains, like bugs, crashes, from the trusted users within few days we will move to the next release – beta release. At this stage we expect our application to have all features we are planing to put in the production version. And this will be the first time we will open our application to the general public. The purpose of beta release will still be gathering feedback from users. But this time audience of users will be much bigger and diverse. Dedicated bug tracking system will be used as a main communication channel. After that we will be ready to put our application on production track.
Visit our website and join the mailing list:
Super !