Heya guys,
I’ve been developing WordPress products for 5 years now. For those of you who’ve taken a shot at product development (alone or with help) you know how multifaceted the attention requirements are.
One person has to be a marketer, a customer service rep, a graphic designer, a product developer, a coder, a quality control developer, and more all at once. If you have a partner you can divide up tasks and responsibilities, but even then it’s difficult for two to get the job done the way a larger company would.
It’s hard. It’s humbling. And success isn’t guaranteed.
For the past three years I’ve been building the components that power Inbound Now, which is a SAAS in development that attempts to bring a comprehensive Inbound Marketing Suite similar to HubSpot directly into WordPress. I’ve made incredible strides. I’ve good review and poor reviews. I have a partner. He’s great. He provides development assistance and hunts out new technologies, goes to conferences, manages the front end sales site, controls company direction with me, etc. Without him I would be years behind and a poorer developer.
In my opinion all is moving well, but I have pressing needs and worries. I want to provide my customers with a top quality product and I am noticing that I am failing a handful of them with every new release.
We clean up the mess quickly, but ideally the mess should never make it to our users instances.
My ideal response would be to have a new partner on my roster that is 100% focused on quality control and what their primary responsibilities would be:
1. Created unit tests and front end macro tests for every customer support issue that ever comes up
I’m talking about a person who knows use macro programs like ubot or other front end automated testing suites AS WELL as Travis CI type unit testing which I’ve never found time or understanding to write myself. Then every time a new support issue arises then the QA person would solve it and analyze it to see if a test can be created to assure the solution always stays in place.
Then every time new updates arrive through git the unit tests would run AND the front end macros would run.
That would take finding and hiring the talent, or having another partner join in exchange for equity and cover this responsibility.
The alternative and more immediate solution is to develop a Beta team. Which I’ve never done. And it seems inefficient because I can’t imagine users that would want to be early adopters to a release that might have undiscovered bugs in it. But apparently there are people out there like that.
Which brings me to a question:
What are good resources for learning how to develop a beta team? What are the insights on developing beta teams?
So in recap this topic states:
- Inbound Now’s deployment systems needs work on the quality control front.
- I imagine what a quality control partner would be like and dream on his/her arrival of talent.
- I wonder on educational resources about developing a beta team, and wonder if the community has any valuable advice/information/education on starting up and maintaining a beta team.
Thank you wp developers for listening. I’m sorry if I hit the TLDR mark!