Talk:Software release life cycle

Gold Master

I believe, but cannot yet source, that we stole that from the music industry, in which I believe the vinyl stampers were gold-plated.
--Baylink 00:11, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I've heard a sort of urban legend (which I believe may be true) that the original final copy of the CD, once complete, is made primarily of pure gold, for its reasons. So 'going gold' is when they ship off that copy to the producers. Totalirrelevance 09:16, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

that REALLY needs to be taken out becuase im like 98% sure its untrue i dont believe a cd can be made out of gold and corrosion isnt an issue with cds but with a gold cd the cd would be destroyed so easily could somebody who knows for sure confirm or unconfirm it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.205.121.168 (talk) 00:07, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I've always though it refers to (gold-coloured) CD-Rs, which are/were often used as master discs for release to manufacturing etc. Letdorf 13:55, 8 May 2007 (UTC).

Of course a CD is never made entirely out of gold, but CD-Rs and DVD-Rs with a gold reflective layer are readily available (just do a search on Amazon.com). Gold media is excellent for archival purposes and would, therefore, be a logical choice for a master disk. 64.142.82.28 23:06, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, folks, you're all wrong. In industry the term "Gold Master" only refers to a known-good reference object, be it hardware or software. It has nothing to do with use of precious metals. Marketing departments may apply alternate meanings to the use of word "gold", again, not having anything to do with the use of precious metals. — Quicksilver^{T @} 19:17, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

The first use of the term "Golden CD" I heard was during the Windows 95 Beta. People who had reported a show-stopper bug were put of the "CD of the week" program, where they were sent a new build each week. To simplify referring to the different builds, each week the CDs were a different color. The second full beta release (which was more stable and went out to all beta testers, not just the weekly ones, as well as industry journalists) were black (jokingly referred to as "beta noir"). The final release, which was sent directly to the beta testers as a reward, at the same time it was sent to bulk reproduction (RTM) before retail distribution, were colored Gold. JamesCurran (talk) 14:56, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

History

The first time I ran across the alpha/beta/final development stages was in early Macintosh documentation from Apple. But where did it originally come from? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.179.208.36 (talk) 20:56, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

I first saw beta being used in software releases on the Internet in the late 80s.. since there was no particular tradition on how to name versions I saw releases of 'beta' versions, because their authors claimed the new version to be better than the one before. So my impression the word 'beta' arose as a joke, and alpha/gamma was subsequently introduced by people who didn't get the joke (a lot later in fact). But of course the Mac manual sounds like it's older than my story..  ;) --lynX —The preceding signed but undated comment was added at 03:33:54, August 19, 2007 (UTC).

"Beta" goes back to at least the 1970s. I don't recall hearing "Alpha" in the context before the 2000s. (I wrote more about this in the "Contradiction with alpha" section, below) JamesCurran (talk) 15:36, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Contradiction with alpha

The header summary claims that in the alpha stage, features are still being added. The pre-alpha section claims that "In contrast to alpha and beta versions, the pre-alpha is not feature complete." In practice, most alpha software is not feature complete. How to resolve this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.155.44.246 (talk) 07:18, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I also spotted this. Personally, I use 'alpha' in the not feature complete sense, and this is how I believe most would use it. But someone needs to do a little research on what is the most common meaning of the word, and then change the article accordingly. 194.52.58.134 (talk) 11:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Alpha testing is a form of acceptance test and should be feature complete. See: Alpha_testing#Alpha_testing. It's defined like this by the international testing standard ISTQB. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.207.96.130 (talk) 08:05, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

The confusion is there because of the evolution of the industry, technically both are right. The feature freeze is what separates Alpha and Beta. Software is "in Alpha" while new features are being added. Nowadays there are often releases in the middle of Alpha (not feature complete yet) with the last Alpha release being feature complete due to the feature-freeze happening right afterward; but in the old days the Alpha test was at the end of Alpha so it was feature complete unless there's a problem. 2600:8800:2B00:7C50:75EF:BEC4:2FB8:F9D1 (talk) 23:10, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

The confusion is the result of "alpha phase" be a backronym. The term "Beta Test" existed for decades before "Alpha" phase was coined. The history goes something like this (I'd update the main article, but I have no sources, other than my own memories). Originally, there was the "beta test site", ie, the second place to use the code. Basically, someone would write something for their own purposes, and share it with someone in a different department/office/company. Since this person's use-case would be slightly different, they would find bugs the author had missed --- even though it is working fine for the original author's use-case. It wasn't until retail applications for the PC did beta testing become a wide-spread and formal process, and with it, the terms "beta tester" and "beta test phase" were created. Eventually, people started talking about an "alpha phase". I wrote a blog article about this (https://honestillusion.com/blog/2023/11/05/what-is-beta-software/). Can I cite that as a reference? JamesCurran (talk) 15:24, 8 April 2025 (UTC)