Alpha & Beta Features and What They Mean For You
Helping Us Help You, Part 11
At Cucumber Tony we love adding new features for you all to play with. Most of the time we work through an internal Alpha/Beta process before releasing to the public working and ready. Sometimes however, we release features to a public Alpha or Beta. But what does this mean for you, the user?
We very rarely release features in an Alpha state, as at this point they may not have the complete and fully functioning feature set planned, so naturally aren’t ready to be used in production..
So we release it into public Alpha for the more curious and hands-on users to play with and see what they make of it. Alpha features are most definitely recommended not to be used in public production deployments.
Beta is slightly different. At this point the feature will have it’s core functionality complete, but may have outstanding or undiscovered issues. As a result, Beta releases may only be suitable for limited production use cases.
There are a number of reasons for releasing a feature into public Alpha/Beta. Most of the time we want to get the users involved with shaping that feature. The features are made for you, so who better to input on how they should work? We might also want to gauge whether people want this feature or if time is best spent working on other things before we commit the resources on bringing it to production.
It is also important to note that any features marked beta or alpha within the Cucumber dashboard or docs are subject to our depreciation policy set out in the terms, and may be removed/changed without notice.
There is also limited support for these features, and no set timescale regarding the migration of an Alpha/Beta feature to a Production ready feature.
So while we know it’s tempting to deploy that shiny new awesome feature to your fleet of devices, it’s worth making sure you understand what the Alpha or Beta label means.
You can find a list of our current Alpha/Beta features here:
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