GetInvolved/BetaTesting

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Revision 20 as of 2008-09-17 09:46:37

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Launchpad Help > Get involved > Beta testing

Introduction

The Launchpad team runs a continuous beta program, as well as special beta test campaigns.

You can get access to the beta program by joining the Launchpad beta testers team. There are close to 1,000 beta testers and we encourage enthusiastic users to join that team to get the very latest functionality in Launchpad.

Continuous "edge" beta testing

Launchpad's edge environment generally runs the latest daily code from the Launchpad developers against the production database (real live data).

Inserting "edge." into any Launchpad URL gets you to the edge environment. So, by and large, the URLs are interchangeable. (Except, of course, when the url points at a new feature in edge.)

For example: bugs.edge.launchpad.net, or http://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bugs/1

If you're a beta tester and you visit the normal launchpad.net production environment, you'll be redirected to the edge servers, unless you've specifically chosen to temporarily turn off that redirection off for a period of time, using the link on the front page at https://launchpad.net/.

The edge servers are production servers in the sense that any modifications or updates made to your data in Launchpad through edge.launchpad.net affects the same production database that everybody else is using on plain launchpad.net. Using the Bazaar version control system, the updates to the edge application servers are all automated and happen daily.

There is another test environment, staging.launchpad.net, which operates under very different rules: the data on it is flushed out and replaced with a copy of the production database every few days. staging is useful if you want to experiment with a feature or to try to reproduce a bug without messing up real data.

dogfood.launchpad.net also has its own database, and you also should not put data into it that you want to keep. The code and content may changed without warning. As of March 2008 it's particularly used for testing Launchpad build infrastructure, and it has its own build slaves.

Special beta campaigns

We also run regular special beta campaigns where we ask our beta testers to try a specific feature that is in beta, and give us feedback, before we make that feature available to the wider user base. We aim to have one feature in special beta testing in each of our monthly release cycles.

Become a beta tester!

Visit the Launchpad beta testers team page to apply to join!

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