Beta testing by community

Hi, do you offer this kind of testing?
Guess there are a lot of experienced zwifters who can assist with testing your software just by riding on their different trainers/platforms. It should help to deliver more quality software in production mode. Regarding payment: it can be free trial of using zwift for some period of time.

There’s currently a beta test of the Android platform.

Obviously, Zwift went through a public beta phase back in 2015/16. I would assume they beta test new features and trainers within the company, and probably some external partners who are under NDA. But I’m not sure they’d benefit much overall from it right now.

It does seem quite often that things slip out into release that we might expect to get picked up in testing. There are many possible reasons for that though.

We’ve no idea if their code is testable in an automated way for example (Google the terms “unit test”, “behavioural test” and “test driven development” if you’re interested in what I mean here). If it’s not, then any new feature brings with it the possibility of unintended problems.

Even with tests, sometimes it comes down to very specific sets of circumstances that developers haven’t anticipated. “Edge cases” that can’t always be predicted, and I agree that more widespread testing might help weed these out before they hit production, but maybe the overhead just isn’t worth it right now.

Who knows, maybe some years down the line they’ll have a whole parallel set up for pre-release versions. It’s something Blizzard do with World or Warcraft and Overwatch for example.

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Actually, there are currently other open beta test going on with Zwift.
Running within Zwift is still considered beta
Directly connecting devices to a Windows 10 PC using BLE just went into beta
As well as Android (which Daren pointed out)

I think you are more or less talking about the actual Zwift App new feature/map testing and I believe that Zwift has staff on hand to handle that. Maybe in the future some users will be included in the testing.

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Good points, well made! :smiley:

Yeah, I was assuming more pre-release testing of features or worlds.

Actually, I think that enhances my question as to what value Zwift would get out of any separate beta stream. Plenty of things can already be beta tested in the main production game, so there’s even less need for a public beta branch.

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