Did Bitwig Hire a New Marketing Person?

[pdxindy]

I know this seems "legit" ... but actually when you pay for a product of work of developers (aka commercial), then why are the beta testers not paid for.

I used to run an urban based organic farm. Over the period of a few years, we had hundreds of volunteers come participate. I would estimate that 50% of the volunteers were a net negative. That is, the amount of energy I put into showing them what to do, correcting mistakes, etc. exceeded the amount of energy it would have taken me to just do the work that they accomplished. Then 35% were a net positive, but only marginally so. The remaining 15% were a significant net positive. It would have been a huge hassle to try to pay volunteers. Both from administrative/tax angle and then setting up some sort of system to define the value of someone vs someone else. The work of setting that up and dealing with the inevitable complaints would have exceeded the value of all volunteers.

I expect it is a similar situation with "beta testers" (i.e. users who try the betas and report bugs).

[] Peter:H []

I know this seems "legit" ... but actually when you pay for a product of work of developers (aka commercial), then why are the beta testers not paid for.

I used to run an urban based organic farm. Over the period of a few years, we had hundreds of volunteers come participate. I would estimate that 50% of the volunteers were a net negative. That is, the amount of energy I put into showing them what to do, correcting mistakes, etc. exceeded the amount of energy it would have taken me to just do the work that they accomplished. Then 35% were a net positive, but only marginally so. The remaining 15% were a significant net positive. It would have been a huge hassle to try to pay volunteers. Both from administrative/tax angle and then setting up some sort of system to define the value of someone vs someone else. The work of setting that up and dealing with the inevitable complaints would have exceeded the value of all volunteers.

I expect it is a similar situation with "beta testers" (i.e. users who try the betas and report bugs).

I bet organic farming is quite similar to software testing ... Did you have these kind of release notes where you change from vesion 4 to 5 of your organic farm and state "regression of 4.4" this many times? Lettuce didn't sound well? Error when exporting appels and peas?
Anyway ... you can always find excuse for this and that... even for getting unpaid workers and make it their fault when they don't perform. In the past I really tried to play their game... didn't turn out to be a good experience... therefore I'm really reluctant to play this "sharing is caring" thing. They get my money. I get their software.
I make my money in IT. And I know when something starts to look dysfunctional. You have to have a extensive automated test suite to avoid regressions and run it each and every sprint or better on each built of your multi-branch pipeline... at least me and my team go for this route.

[mevla]

I do not know why they are doing this round of early beta testing. I do not know why from the employee standpoint. Why add stress to the working day by a public 'rush' to release ? Hopefully this is only but a PR show and internally there's no stress that could influence the quality.

[pdxindy]

therefore I'm really reluctant to play this "sharing is caring" thing. They get my money. I get their software.

Then ignore the betas and keep using 4.4 until 5.0 is released.

[Dionysos]

I make my money in IT.

Then you'll know that automated tests aren't a silver bullet and only catch regressions that you thought about writing a test case for.

It's incredibly presumptuous to look at a compiled piece of software as an outsider, especially in beta, and think you can tell anything about the development or testing practices that were used to create it.

[BobDog]

BitWig would be nigh on impossible to automatically test, anyone that thinks this would be possible knows absolutely nothing about automated testing!

[nowiamone]

I think Betatesters doing their "job" for free is very common/normal/okay, for professional software but also games.
Steinbergs "VST Live" release was an example of a kind of "unwanted beta-testing" which i think is not okay, but this is not the case here, since Bitwig 4 is a stable product, and B5 Beta is optional

Since i like the organic farming metaphors, we can think of features which are implemented as little chicklets being hatched, haha. The B5 Browser had quite some hatching issues though.

[Jac459]

BitWig would be nigh on impossible to automatically test, anyone that thinks this would be possible knows absolutely nothing about automated testing!

I confirm, in my day job we have a payment system having 55.000 tests running every nights (junit+cucumber)... we still have bugs.


On the whole beta number polemic, I think indeed, 12 is a too big number, but it is because bitwig developers tried to chew a too big update in one go. This update is absolutely huge of you considere on how the modulation system is central to the software.

So yes, in one hand, they certainly have been a bit too "courageous". But on the positive side, after all that, we will get the most advanced DAW modulation system on the planet .

Another point is that these periods of "failed" beta testing are in fact a total nightmare for the development teams, so I really which them all the best.

[liquidsound]

But on the positive side, after all that, we will get the most advanced DAW modulation system on the planet .

Not from where I come from!

[Jac459]

But on the positive side, after all that, we will get the most advanced DAW modulation system on the planet .

Not from where I come from!

Are you a time traveller coming from the future?

[liquidsound]

But on the positive side, after all that, we will get the most advanced DAW modulation system on the planet .

Not from where I come from!

Are you a time traveller coming from the future?

I guess my location doesn’t show on small screens

[BobDog]

BitWig would be nigh on impossible to automatically test, anyone that thinks this would be possible knows absolutely nothing about automated testing!

I confirm, in my day job we have a payment system having 55.000 tests running every nights (junit+cucumber)... we still have bugs.


On the whole beta number polemic, I think indeed, 12 is a too big number, but it is because bitwig developers tried to chew a too big update in one go. This update is absolutely huge of you considere on how the modulation system is central to the software.

So yes, in one hand, they certainly have been a bit too "courageous". But on the positive side, after all that, we will get the most advanced DAW modulation system on the planet .

Another point is that these periods of "failed" beta testing are in fact a total nightmare for the development teams, so I really which them all the best.

I had a contract a couple of years ago to have a look at a micro-services based system that was about to go live in a couple of months, around 40 developers, two years work so far, boss was a bit worried.

Probably 90% of the code they had written was unit test code that ran in the build system. There were no integration tests and shockingly no one had ever actually ever ran the system up, they thought relying on automated unit tests was enough.

First job was to get an actual system working, surprise surprise nothing worked at all, totally useless, didn't scale, didn't work under load, data loss, just totally hopeless.

All tests passed every build though!

[Jac459]

I had a contract a couple of years ago to have a look at a micro-services based system that was about to go live in a couple of months, around 40 developers, two years work so far, boss was a bit worried.

Probably 90% of the code they had written was unit test code that ran in the build system. There were no integration tests and shockingly no one had ever actually ever ran the system up, they thought relying on automated unit tests was enough.

First job was to get an actual system working, surprise surprise nothing worked at all, totally useless, didn't scale, didn't work under load, data loss, just totally hopeless.

All tests passed every build though!

Hehe, the famous UK plug to put in a Japanese socket...
Fortunately we have unit tests, behavioural tests (a shit ton of it), neighbourhood test, integration tests, E2E tests, UAT, and fake client (an external company that we pay to be our client)... Yet on massively distributed systems it very difficult to "monkey' test everything...

Going back to Bitwig, UI tests, as I am sure you agree, are much more expansive and with less ROI than other type of tests... So I feel their pain...

[BobDog]

I can't even imagine how you could realistically automate full testing of BW via the UI.

[nowiamone]

Someone linked to or revived an older thread the other day which included some responses from one of the Bitwig devs, so it hasn't always been like this. Good old times, though they probably had good reasons to step away from directly interacting with people, it's probably not great for mental health, and to be fair the entitled attitude that some people display around feature requests and roadmap transparency validates that decision.

This forum isn't worth moderating and unfortunately a few bad apples here simply stink up the forum and aren't worth interacting with.

“Never play chess with a pigeon.
The pigeon just knocks all the pieces over.
Then shits all over the board.
Then struts around like it won.”

No reason for Bitwig to interact here.

Dear Dionysos and Billcarroll:
It's incredibly fascinating to read your opinions on Bitwigs NON-communication with its userbase.
As defenders of NON-communication, you can certainly answer the following questions:

1 do you know what a community manager is? A community managers whole purpose is being able to EASILY deal with any kind of online-situation, especially in small-scale forums. I hope you know that such a jobprofile exists: "Managers of a community are required to know how to derive meaningful conversations and also collect actionable insights for the brand." "Excellent communication skills. Organizational and project management skills. Interpersonal skills. Analytical ability. Market research skills. Domain knowledge. Adaptability. Engagement skills."

2 You talk about SOME people who have an "entitled attitude", and a FEW "bad apples" who "stink up the forum and aren't worth interacting with." I hope you agree with me that the majority of forum users here are actually good people?
So if you agree on 1 and 2, there's no reason to NOT communicate. Why should the good, kind, and constructively arguing majority be completely abandoned? A skilled community manager would be able to deal with unfruitful community members, and engage in highly fruitful/meaningful/purposeful interaction with the majority of the community.

3 Do you really think that an absolute lack of roadmap transparency is a good thing? To the extent that you don't even know IF a feature request which got sent in via email by many people since several years (Gridlines behind clips in arrangement view, piano roll issues, etc) will ever be CONSIDERED to be implemented, or will not be implemented within the next 5 years? Or would a clear "no" or "not within the next 5 years" not be fair to hear for paying customers, in order to make a based decision to look for another software?