Can Vegas be made better with public betas?

TeetimeNC wrote on 6/9/2010, 8:15 AM

One of my most enjoyable programs to use is Adobe's Lightroom. It was recommended to me by a fellow photographer and Vegas user. I have now been using LR for about two years and have come to really appreciate its elegant design, usability and stability.

I believe one of the key reasons for this program's excellence is the public betas Adobe conducts when developing this product. Here is what Adobe says about the LR public beta program:

"There have been over 600,000 downloads of the Lightroom 3 public beta, which has supplied us with a huge amount of valuable feedback from a passionate community of professional and advanced amateur photographers," said Kevin Connor, vice president of product management for Digital Imaging at Adobe.

I am sure conducting a public beta requires a lot of work, but then so does rushing out post-release updates to correct problems that weren't found during beta testing by a relatively small set of selected users. It isn't hard to recognize that the types of problems that slipped through Vegas 9 testing would have been uncovered with testing by a broader group of users. Bugs will always slip through even the most thorough testing, but things like the problem with generated text media, and slow project loads should have never slipped through. If public betas can eliminate these kinds of snafus, Vegas users will be happier, and the SCS division of Sony will look more pofessional.

I'm not sure whether we as a group can influence SCS in this, but I hope they will at least consider open public betas for Vegas 10.

/jerry

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Comments

VanLazarus wrote on 6/14/2010, 1:33 PM

A well organized public beta (with direct developer involvement) can only help a product like Vegas which runs on a wide range of hardware and needs to work with a plethora of third party software.

There have been many easy to find, yet fatal bugs that have slipped through whatever quality assurance program SCS currently has. This just makes SCS look unprofessional, angers it's loyal users, wastes SCS resources dealing with numerous patches, and turns some to adopt competing products.

Having worked in the video game field making games for consoles such as the Sony Playstation, we did not have the luxury of patching buggy software later. The first version burned on the DVD had to be bulletproof. This made the quality assurance programs very extensive, even under the extreme pressure to produce a game in a short amount of time.

SCS needs to treat their major releases more like Microsoft treated Windows 7. After the Vista debacle, they knew that the next version of Windows had to be more reliable... they had an extensive beta program for W7 and voila, W7 is more stable than Vista was even after multiple service packs!

Google has a smart strategy.... most everything they release is labled beta for a long time. Gmail was labeled beta for a few years.
Sony shouldn't be trying to squeeze more money out of it's customers for a new version that has not be fully tested in the multitude of situations that any NLE is forced to deal with.

If one keeps on trying to add new features without religiously addressing known bugs beforehand, I believe you begin to exponentially increase the complexity of existing bugs.

I've definately noticed that Vegas's reliability has been steadily declining since I first bought version 5 about 5 years ago, especially in version 9.

Instead of Version X.0b only solving critical bugs in Version X.0a, it's ignoring some of the critical bugs, adding new features, and creating more bugs, some of them extremely critical! This is a dangerous way to make software that people need to be reliable for their livelihood! If Sony wants Vegas to gain market share on some of the products considered more "professional" they can't continue to do this!

Unfortunately, if a Vegas public beta gets the same staff as SCS's current support system.... it will probably be a waste of time... Software engineers in Madison need to be directly involved!