A bit of insight into the role of Beta Engineer with LCS "Budapest"

I am currently the Beta Engineer for our Budapest product which is a web browser solution for clients not running the Microsoft Office Communicator client. The goal of this client is to reach those with older operating systems, i.e. pre-Windows 2000 SP4 and pre Windows XP. They are also targeting non-Windows operating systems as well such as Macintosh, Linux and UNIX.

So I can't say much about the actual product as it is in beta (you know I should check to see if that announcement exists anywhere or can be posted here) but I can give you a bit of insight into what my days and weeks are like.

So the build before the beta was given to only a handful, ok 2 handfuls (10) customers who agree to deploy the product on a given schedule to a certain number of users and test various real world configurations. In return they get direct access to the product group via a sponsor and weekly team meetings. I am the first person they are supposed to go to with any technical questions. This is more about me being an entry point helping to funnel the questions and problems back to the product group. The idea being that I will be aware of most reported items and will check to see if this is documented, a bug or requires that we reproduce the problem and get logs for further research.

This week was the rollout of Beta to what I term the managed beta, those folks who were nominated by the above mentioned announcement.  So I was monitoring the wrong newsgroup and did not have the correct query for reported bugs, so on Thursday we cleared this confusion up and I started in the back of the pack trying to clear up the backlog. The newsgroups I have caught up and Monday I will likely be completely back on track meeting our stated goals for follow up. The bugs that came from those same folks, I am sorely behind on, there were more bugs reported via that mechanism vs. the newsgroup. Personally I wish the problems would be reported in the newsgroup first and that I request they create the bug or I do it, this way the community would already know about the problem and not worry about duplicating the information.

Oh, remember the 10 customers who work directly with the product group? I have been working with 2 of them daily all week on 2 different problems related to either setting it up in their environment and the difficulties associated with beta code which of course doesn't do everything the way the released code would. The other issue is a sign-in issue failing which is reported in the newsgroups and one that I have also reproduced in my environment using Virtual Server. But troubleshooting a beta product with no logging in it is no fun. Remember the post earlier this year about the 8 week internship with our escalation team? Well I should have learned skills there that would help me today. I have to say that I misused that 8 week period and did not walk away with what I could have in hindsight. Regardless, I am fortunate enough to still be sitting with that team so I am able to get their assistance immediately. So right now I am actively debugging the product with the suggestions from the product group.

So this first week has been a whirlwind of activity in which I am trying to stay on top of.

Toml LCSKid