Wine to Reach A Major Milestone

Wine to Reach A Major Milestone

Posted Oct 8, 2005 1:03 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
Parent article: Wine to Reach A Major Milestone

This milestone is apparently just a statement from developers that they will start trying harder than before to stabilize the release. It's obvious that Wine has been in beta test, and full production, for years.

Incidentally, since people sometimes misunderstand the terms, here is what alpha and beta test mean:

Alpha test is the test done by developers by simulating work loads. Its only purpose is to find bugs; not to get any work done. If the program is an editor, alpha testers would pretend to edit files and try various sequences of commands, but they will just throw the file away when the test is done. In the commercial world, you have to pay people to do alpha test The quality of alpha test is limited by testers' imagination.

Beta test is a test done in real production. A real user performs a real job using the code under test. In the editor case, the beta tester would use the code to prepare an actual web page or update a real config file. But half the purpose of the work is still to find bugs. The beta tester knows the code hasn't been fully tested yet, therefore has bugs, so is careful about how much he depends on it. In the commercial world, you can often get beta testing for free (perhaps more precisely -- you can get beta testing for nothing more than a chance to get early access to the code).

Full production is like beta test except that there is no objective, or expectation, to find bugs. In small open source projects, there is no meaningful difference between a beta test and production.

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