It will only take us a few days until we can enter the testing period at SimpleSnip. What does this mean? ‘Testing period’ means the whole testing from the moment i open the Site for a small number of testers unto what we call “final”. In this period there will be some more phases where each of them marks different milestones:

• phase 1 (closed alpha): about 80% of the features planned for final are already working without big errors. Phase 1 is primarly to quickly find the bigger and important bugs and fix them asap and also add the remaining feature set and probably point out some important new features.
• phase 2 (closed beta): features are complete. In phase 2 the small beta team (normally not bigger than the alpha team) does intensive testing to find all remaining bugs. No new features are added in this phase (normally *g*).
• phase 3 (closed beta): new beta testers are invited to fix the next round of bugs. During this phase the beta team may continuesly grow based on system reasearch. This phase is important for performance tests. We will probably switch to a read-only open version so guests can already read what the beta testers post to the system but can not register themselves for the site.
• phase 4 (open beta): this is the phase where we open the system for registration at invite everyone to take part. The “beta” makes not really much difference to the final stage but only shows we’re still in a early phase of living and kinda strange things may happen – but of course shouldn’t. This “beta” will probably not be in the logo and shouldn’t take too long also – i give it a maximum of 4 weeks.

Unfortunately i can’t give a prediction already how long the complete testing will take but i think this shouldn’t be more than 3-4 weeks + phase 4.