What Is an Alpha Test? Definition, Importance & Steps

What is an Alpha Test?

Wondering about “alpha tests”? We caught wind of your questions and thought we’d spill the beans on what those are. Let’s dive into it together!

In essence, alpha testing refers to a phase in software development where the core functionality is fully developed, but the product still needs to be polished or finalized. It’s an early internal test, sometimes done in-house by devs themselves.

Devs start testing to find and address major bugs or anomalies at this stage before moving into more public testing. Think of it as an initial “proof of concept” stage before showing the product to others.

Once the bulk of problems are fixed, the product heads to beta testing. This often opens to a small set of external testers to evaluate flow, usability, and ease of learning. Their feedback helps smooth rough edges.

Alpha testing is done before beta testing. Alpha test is performed to ensure the functionality of the product features before revealing it to the users by beta testing and launch. 

The testing procedure can be black box testing, in which the tester is unaware of the feature or design element being tested. It can also be white box testing, where the tester knows what features, designs, or internal structures are being tested. 

The testing team is independent and conducted in a simulated environment by internal testers that consist of stakeholders, members, etc. They analyze the performance and functionality of the product based on test cases and tasks included in the product’s service. 

Hope this helps explain what “alpha testing” involves!

Conducting an Alpha Test

Alpha testing is conducted by quality assurance development teams and tested by internal testers consisting of stakeholders, developers, and other employees to ensure more and more in-house testers are involved, and better feedback is collected. 

The test cases and tasks are divided into testing categories, from which different groups of testers conduct targeted testing to ensure an all-around examination of the software product overall. 

The issues encountered by the testing groups are reported to the development teams. The testing cycle continues through re-testing and is concluded and passed on to the beta stage, when no other feature is required to be added to enhance the product performance and capabilities.

Steps Involved in Alpha Testing

The steps in the Alpha testing process are as follows: 

• Requirement analysis: This is the initial step where the design specification is reviewed to figure out all the functional and non-functional requirements of the software.

• Test planning: Following up with the requirements analysis of the test development plan is created to mark out all the test cases.

• Test case execution: The test plan and cases have been laid out. The alpha testing begins from here. The strategies and cases are implemented. The primary objective is to tweak bugs and errors in the software system.

• Issue logging: When an issue or a bug is identified in the software, it is logged in a separate system.

• Bug fixing: After the bugs and issues are tracked and logged, the developers work on them to fix them.

• Retesting: This is the concluding step in which, after the issues and bug fixes are done, the testers repeat the testing procedure. This process continues until no further problems or bugs in the software remain. 

Phases of Alpha Test 

In the first phase, the in-house software developers use debugging tools to trap the bugs in the program. This phase also targets other issues regarding the features. 

In the second phase, the black box and white box testing methods are invoked by the quality assurance (QA) team. The issue resolution process is carried out parallel to the testing where problems are found.

Advantages Of an Alpha Test 

• More intuitive knowledge can be gained about the software’s reliability and serviceable capability at the initial stages.

• The involvement of black-and-white box testing helps thoroughly identify the product’s strengths and weaknesses at an all-round level. Black box testing works for the input-output functions, and white box testing examines the software’s internal design.

• Feedback and checks at an initial stage support product refinement before exposure to real users. The testing environment is a simulation of actual-world conditions with the same tasks.

• The development team can observe and understand the software’s response and functioning through alpha testing while serving the end users, reliability, and accountability.

• As the issues are tracked in advance, the development re-work and the delivery time are reduced. 

Why Should Alpha Test Be Conducted?

Product refinement and excellence through feedback collection and analysis are the main objectives of product testing. 

Through alpha testing, the product aspects are analyzed in a simulated environment that resembles the actual user conditions and test cases that help the development teams understand what fundamental changes are to be made to the product and validate the product’s functionality and efficiency before it is exposed to the end users.