Real World Technology Feedback

First Time Users

What is Required for Me to Be an Alpha or Beta User or Alpha or Beta Organization?

You need to register with our service and then store your profile about your computing environment and skills on this website (www.alphabetafinder.com). You do not need a technical background to participate and no prior testing experienced is required. Although some of our participants are test professionals between jobs or looking to gain technical experience with new technology, you do not have to be a professional or experienced QA or Technical Tester to sign up for AlphaBeta Finder participation. In fact, you may be more desireable if you have no experience! Technology vendors are often looking for untrained, fresh users to test usability or the intuitiveness of their hardware or software's features.

Other requirements are:

• You must be at least 18 years of age but can live in any country and speak any language; however, the AlphaBeta Finder web site and service is produced in English.
• You do need to be willing and able to use your own computer for the testing from your own home or authorized by your employer to use one in your employer's facility.
• You will need broadband Internet access and browser capability from this computer in order to participate in AlphaBeta Finder.
• You will need to be able to commit to the time and duration the development project requests for the testing.
• You will need to be able to provide input to the development project in some cases in written form, in other cases through phone interviews or through web sessions.
• You must not use the AlphaBeta Finder to spam, solicit, or sell to others (see Terms of Use for more information).

What do I do to participate?

Participation is simple and free.

1. Create a User Profile on the AlphaBeta Finder web site. Your user name must be a valid email name. Email is the primary communication method for participation in AlphaBeta Finder.

2. Open the email from us about your registration. Use the email link to return to the AlphaBeta Finder web site and create your password.

3. Login with your new email user name and password and create your Profile. One Profile enables all possible ways of user participation. That is, you can be matched as an Alpha user, an Alpha organization, a Beta user, and a Beta organization. This is convenient because most of our participants want multiple ways to participate--they might agree to be Alphas for some projects and Betas for others.

You can of course save your profile and come back as often as you want to add more information or make changes.

Be truthful about your skills, experience, configurations, and software. If a development company gets back to us with information that your profile was inaccurate or misleading, we will make an attempt to reach you to correct it and/or may have to remove your information from our site.

4. Make sure your profile status is "Active" if you want it to be available for searches.

You can store your info or partial info and "Activate" or "Inactivate" your profile so that it is not available for searches. If you get busy and can't donate time to an AlphaBeta project, it is best to inactivate your profile so that development teams do not try to contact you. If a particular machine configuration is temporarily unavailable, be sure to inactivate it so that you are not asked to use it for a test.

5. Keep your profile active by having some activity on it every 6 months.

If you turn up in a development project search and are contacted via email by us for participation and do not respond with a Accept or Decline, we may eventually set your profile to Inactive so that it is no longer available for searches. If this was somehow a mistake and you still want to be available for other projects, you can then login to AlphaBeta Finder to manually re-activate your profile.

You will need to access your profile at least once every six months to keep it active for searches. We send you automated reminder emails and track whether or not you do this. This is because people's availability and especially machine information such as software and version configuration changes frequently. In order to provide worthwhile matches between you and development projects, it is important to keep your profile accurate. If you record that you have an AIX operating system, but then the machine it is on is de-commissioned, it is important that you uncheck the AIX data so that you are not contacted to do AIX testing.

6. Be responsive--even if it's NO. Respond Yes or No to any emails from us about development projects you are eligible for but at least respond. When a development project looks for Alphas or Betas, your profile will turn up if you meet their requirements and are "Active". The development company can ask us to email you with their project details. If you get one of these emails, you must at least respond, even with a NO, to keep your profile active for other searches. This tells us your email address is still valid and that you are still interested in participating but not on that particular project.

Responding to these emails is also a convenient way to change or inactivate your profile or update machine info or other details.

7. Check your profile at AlphaBeta Finder whenever you want to see your Status. You will see if you've been invited to a project. If you missed a project invitation email, you can re-generate a view of it and can respond to it there. You can see if you are participating in a test and project that is still ongoing.

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