SourceTree Beta Program – A look behind the curtains
By Rahul Chhabria on March 31, 2016Last week we announced a new beta program for SourceTree, and I want to thank everyone who signed up to be a trusted tester. We received a lot of interest and are in the process of building a few new features and improvements for you to try out. For those who haven’t signed up yet, don’t wait too long. We’re still accepting trusted testers, get in now by signing up here.
In the coming weeks, we’ll release our first SourceTree Beta and want to give you a look behind the curtains at the testing process, both internal and external, so you can see how the beta program will work.
Step 1: Alpha
SourceTree Alpha is where we turn your feedback in to features that we test internally. SourceTree Alpha will not be available for public download. However, in one off cases, we will reach out to a few trusted testers for early feedback.
Step 2: Blitz!
1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, …, BLITZ!!!
Once we determine a set of improvements that are ready for a public release, we will build a beta candidate. The beta candidate will go through intensive acceptance testing with our QA team- essentially making the beta candidate feel like a college quarterback on their first day against the top-ranked NFL defense.
Step 3: Beta
All systems go! When the beta candidate passes internal acceptance testing, it’s ready for our beta community to give it a spin. Initially, the SourceTree Beta will be available for download from our public repository and will not replace your production copy. Your version of SourceTree and the SourceTree Beta will be able to run side by side, and each instance will offer updates independent of each other. Beta releases will have features in early preview that may have stability or performance issues so they will be kept separate from production.
The best part of the beta program is the feedback loop. To make feedback reporting seamless for the trusted testers, we’ve implemented Fabric and BugSplat (tools that make crash reporting easy) in SourceTree for OS X and Windows respectively. Another option is to report any issues with the label “trusted_tester” via our Trusted Tester Issue Tracker.
Step 4: Early Access
Once we’ve confirmed there aren’t any show stoppers reported by our trusted testers, the most current version of the SourceTree Beta (Early Access build) will be made available for public download via www.sourcetreeapp.com or https://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview, rather than prompting users with an in-app update. To get notified about Early Access builds, follow us on Twitter. Please note that Early Access versions of SourceTree are considered production ready and will replace your existing copy of SourceTree.
Step 5: General Availability
The final stretch! We will take this last week to make sure nothing falls through the cracks before we prompt you with in-app updates. Assuming all systems are pointing to ‘go’, roughly one week after being made available for early access, the last Early Access version of SourceTree will be made the official production version.
Sign up to become a trusted tester in the SourceTree Beta
Now that you know the process, we would love you to be a part of it. Our never-ending goal is to make SourceTree the best Git and Mercurial client out there, and we’re only at our best with your contributions and your feedback. So, if you haven’t already, sign up to become a trusted tester today and keep an eye out for the newest updates from SourceTree.
4 Comments
You have alphas and betas? Really? Since two – three months ago I’ve been under a strong impression that you’re deploying right from developers’ machines, real agile-like and employ your users like free alpha-testers. Bugs are multiplying and proliferating.
For example first login dialog after installation throws you into a tiny window showing part of standard “manage your account” web page after successful login and there is no way to move to actual SourceTree UI. Close the window and you’re back at the login dialog with two buttons on it. I know I managed to fight through this feature a month ago, but I don’t remember how. Guess I should start looking for a replacement. Bummer…
Mikka, have a look at https://www.gitkraken.com/. I’ve been using that recently and so glad I found it. SourceTree for Windows at the latest version is just not as good as what it used to be.
GitKraken looks nice – but it uses libgit2 which seems not to handle the core.precomposeunicode setting correctly (yet) – which means on Mac OS X all files with composed Umlauts (e.g. German Ü) are marked as dirty. Maybe GitKranken is nice on Windows, but on Mac OS X its not ready yet (for me at least), as having 500 files in my repository marked as dirty only for having umlauts in its names is a showstopper for me…
Here’s praying that you will end up with something that’s actually _better_ than version 1.7, rather than the current version which is much, much worse.