Senior vice president at Novell, Sheri Anderson, knows a lot about beta testing. Until recently, she was also the company's chief information officer with a large global networking infrastructure of her own to support.
In this role, Anderson considered herself a typical Novell customer in terms of the company's size and very representative of what Novell's external customers do with its products and services. However, while most of Novell's existing or potential customers wait until its products ship, Novell internally has to act as a reference site for its own technology and Anderson claims her philosophy was one of complete transparency. Novell's IS department is also the company's first customer, receiving all new products in beta stage, sometimes even in alpha stage. And even though Anderson does not describe herself as a "tester", the department has a documented process to "help manage expectations from engineering".
"The engineering and product development functions both have a rigorous set of system tests they run. We [then] deploy the products in a typical environment and give engineering very comprehensive and carefully organised feedback when we have any problems. You expect to run into bugs with alpha and beta code and one of the benefits of finding them internally is that external customers don't get them.
"However, nobody likes to hear that their code has bugs, so we try to figure out how can we help engineering and make them want to hear from us rather than want us to go away. So we have a carefully controlled process in IS where engineering never hears about the same problem more than once. We collect the diagnostic data that our customers often don't have time to do because it would require a longer outage. Then we prioritise for engineering which bugs need to be fixed first and when we get a fix we roll it out very quickly so they can find out if it has worked or not. And sometimes a problem found and fixed in one product can be useful when another problem occurs in another product," Anderson said.
And to keep her own troops motivated? Anderson always found free pizza extremely useful.
