Totally "out of the blue" on April 24, I received an email saying I had been "selected" to try out the new Mormon Church sponsored Family Search and Family Tree Programs in what is known in computer language as "beta testing". Of course I have no idea whether 200 were asked or 200,000. It would be interesting to see how high the participation rate was.
Although the first email said we'd be thoroughly instructed before starting the beta test, the only instruction I saw was in the program itself which has lots of context sensitive help. Now beta test programs are supposed to be pretty clean as opposed to alpha testing when you expect all sorts of bugs. And it was interesting for me to compare these programs with CADDIS, the system that was supposedly going to be so great for the regional centers. That was truly an alpha test judging from the errors which were easily found.
The script used was very different. With CADDIS we were only supposed to enter specific data in specific fields and we still got errors. With the church programs there was a general instruction such as "find a person who divorced shortly before dying" and its up to the tester to actually locate such a person.
There were 19 pages of testing instructions but a person would have to be close to crazy to test it all or so excited by the pending implementation.
After what seemed like a very short time for beta testing (about 10 days) we were asked to complete a short survey then directed to the Production Version of the program. I think that is another indicator of having a really clean program.
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