My app has gone into beta testing with the team. Wooohooo! Yet, I must confess, I feel a little trepidation.

Beta testing is a curious term and comes from the concept of alpha (first round tests) and beta (second round tests). So my alpha testing was predominantly done by myself and a colleague who has been working closely with me on the overall project, she is not technical at all, which in alot of ways was a good thing. This beta testing is being done by people who have seen screenshots and short walkthroughs but never had the opportunity to use it for themselves.

Terminology, acronyms and buzz words. They litter our world, but make things easier to understand in some ways, by conceptualising things into a single word or phrase.

Take Software Engineering. From one who has spent a fair amount of my life writing bespoke applications  I disagree with this one, writing code is as much an art form as a type of engineering. There is beauty, elegance and logic in those lines of code. There are rules too, but they way something is crafted and carefully knitted together can be an artistic creation.

Marketing loves buzz words. “The cloud”. It is a fair description, but not a new concept. Hosting stuff on the interweb has been around for easily over a decade.

But back to my app. I still have a major piece of functionality left to implement. It needs to sync its local data with SharePoint. And time is passing quickly, launch is not that far away. Tick tock, tick tock!

Responses from the team have been encouraging – amazing, awesome and stunning are all terms that have been bandied around this week. That is, until it falls over in a big heap due to a bug. It has taken many months and countless long days to get to this point. And while it may be over 11,000 lines of code and growing, it is just a beginning. It provides a basis for building something better. Something revolutionary for the wider team.