a) by asking people to sign an NDA before beta testing, you're slamming a door in the face of the overwhelming majority of potential testers. If you want to ensure a purely CYA legal policy, just stick in TOS as they sign in to test (that won't turn off most since most don't read TOS)
b) while it's true that you are unlikely to find someone who'll look, test out everything, and summarize in constructive bullet points, it's missing the point a bit. Your ultimate goal should be to find large number of warm bodies (ideally, from target audience) to throw at your app and then have infrastructure & discipline in place to observe them and make inferences. Also I think we need to differentiate between alpha and beta testing, they require different approaches (and I suspect that the author is talking about what I would call alpha: pre-functional still secretive app).
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A few points:
a) by asking people to sign an NDA before beta testing, you're slamming a door in the face of the overwhelming majority of potential testers. If you want to ensure a purely CYA legal policy, just stick in TOS as they sign in to test (that won't turn off most since most don't read TOS)
b) while it's true that you are unlikely to find someone who'll look, test out everything, and summarize in constructive bullet points, it's missing the point a bit. Your ultimate goal should be to find large number of warm bodies (ideally, from target audience) to throw at your app and then have infrastructure & discipline in place to observe them and make inferences. Also I think we need to differentiate between alpha and beta testing, they require different approaches (and I suspect that the author is talking about what I would call alpha: pre-functional still secretive app).