The final step before beta testing, alpha testing is most often done in house or by a team who is appraised of business and functional requirements and design specifications. Sometimes this testing is performed before the product is completely finalized. Most in-house QA performs alpha testing as a regular part of their job.

This step before the final testing phase helps to ensure that requirements are met, design specifications are complete, and that all of the significant application functions are in working order. The goal is to find as many of the defects as possible before it goes to beta test. Generally speaking, this phase of testing ensures that the product is ready for an outside team to use.

A good alpha test will have a well-defined, methodical test plan with comprehensive test cases and/or benchmarks to fully measure the product. This phase of testing normally involves several iterations, a lot of defect logging, defect fixes, and re-testing. Almost exclusively done by QA professionals, alpha testing can be a very long process.

QA Mentor’s Testing Execution On-Demand Service has a rotating team of quality assurance professionals who are ready to work on your project immediately with automated or manual tests. For the fully manual project, our Manual Test Design and Execution Service is available to work with your developers, business analysts, and managers to go over requirements, build a comprehensive test plan, design thorough test cases, rapidly execute the tests, help remediate defects, and retest until the project is satisfactorily completed.