A beta usually sounds like a great idea, but with the difficulties of software development--hitting deadlines, feature drift, and push to release biding time can be challenging. Both agile development and patience paid off in this case. In the preparations for our 4.0 beta, we spent an entire sprint (28 days) dealing with our internal feedback of things that were 'non-optional' to fix before our ultimate release. Now, we're "waiting" a sprint for feedback to roll in.

The challenge comes in distilling the feedback and determining the value of what has been said and suggested, and what hasn't been said. For example, if everyone talks about the size of the new icons (which are intentionally quite large) does it mean that they thought most everything else was great? Or does it mean they stopped looking after they were scared away by the large icons?

The triage process as will begin next week where we decide what of the feedback gets rolled into the software now, what goes into the product backlog for later, and what gets 'held' for further input, suggestion, or interest.

Meanwhile, the development teams have been hard at work playing with buzzwords like RSS and REST.

[tags]intellicontact, beta, rss, rest, scrum[/tags]