Actually, the post by Dona that there was a hold up because the build candidate could not open uwp was the most detailed I can recall. I'm almost content to wait until this coming Weds because Debian Sid, with the experimental repos enabled, gives me 50-70 updates a day. A very few require a reboot - mostly just have to log off and on. And then, of course, there are the VMware VMs, which by now are 500GB worth of OS's.
It is scientific and what we do is scientifically analysed too, despite our tendency to try and improve the situation!
It is in the nature of scientifically run trials that they are ramdomised and that the agents and participants are "blinded" - not knowing what to expect from any particular test or process.
The "mushroom theory" (keep us in the dark and feed us with manure) is a common comic example of this.
Some cases are controls having received neutral or placebo input during the process, others will receive more potent input during the trial without being alerted to which group they are in.
The trouble is that the participants are human and curious and may develop beliefs that affect their behaviour, and worse, communicate these beliefs to other participants, changing their behaviour too, beyond the original conditions laid out by the researchers and developers.
Thus a build or update that is found by some early adopters to be difficult to install, or to be repeatedly bugchecking, may be feared by other users who may not attempt to install it on the basis of the reports from those with difficulties, or will perform workarounds based on popular received knowledge.
The effect of this may be to reduce the number of attempted installations since some are convinced "to sit this one out", based on the experiences of others, or avoiding an upgrade and obtaining an unsupported clean install instead. This may skew the statistics for the analysts working out the results.
There are always going to be differences between faster and slower hardware combinations. Whereas internal rings may have optimum hardware and strictly regulated third party additions, and run much of the early testing on standardised VMs, the Insiders offer a multi-dimensioned testbed for mainstream real world testing.
Feedback and Insider reporting offers subjective experiences to be communicated by participants, however this is very limited and likely to be irreproducible without the necessary combination of hardware and software, but the biggest wealth of objective reports come from telemetry, mostly from failure mode dumps.
Fortunately feedback and telemetry is tied together by the Insider Account unless the user uses separate accounts for testing and feedback.
When these reports come to MS electronically via the well established WER route following bugchecks,and other routes like rollbacks they feed directly into the analytical system that has led to the improved quality and stability of Windows so much over the past decade and a half.
That's a pretty well established methodology - data mining - and I know that some of my medico-scientist colleagues thought it was not scientific, since it turns the traditional scientific method on its head. It doesn't, really, it's just a tool to give insights into complex datasets - like a telescope resolves very distant objects, or a microscope very small ones.
The traditional scientific method starts off with a proposal, say "that B always follows A", and then goes out to falsify or test that hypothesis through experiment.
If no experiment can falsify the original premise, then the theory is generally considered to be sound, but it is never possible that a theory can be proved - Newtonian theory was superseded (shown to be inaccurate in some circumstances) by Einsteinian relativity, but is considered a special case that is generally applicable to non-relativistic situations.
Data mining has no original premise - it is a shotgun approach that takes all available outcomes and all measurable variables over a large number of test situations, and derives relationships and probabilities between variables, combinations of factors and the outcomes.
Thus any set of starting values can be given a predictive value even before testing.
It is then that the scientific process comes into play.
A theory may be established why an unwanted event may happen and the system can be examined to see if there is a causative explanation and a fix for it.
Since only MS has the code, the analysts and their data from us, and their developers in regular conference, they will get around to their considered priorities, which may not be the same as ours.
Some bugs may never get fixed.
Testing if a build runs or not, does NOT qualify as BETA...it is pre-ALPHA and is nothing close to what we insiders have signed up for.
Testing new features and apps on a stable platform on the other hand, we can call BETA testing. There we know the core OS is stable but some new features could misbehave a bit.
I would even call latest release versions of Windows just BETA or Release Candidate. Too many issues all over the world.
Whether you're avidly testing new Builds and faithfully submitting feedback about them or not, is occasionally beside the point;
basically, new Builds and features are often introduced with much fanfare, then received with much bitter disappointment by many users when things, or the whole OS, doesn't work!
That's the way it is.
My two cents!
I am sorry my friend. You are using tserm Alpha and Beta irrelevantly by common definition of terms.
In normal common definition terms, Alpha versions are prerelease versions not yet ready for official realease to target audience. No such definition as pre-Alpha.
Beta versions are versions that are near completion and nearly ready for final release.
MS do not even use the terms alpha and beta but if they did all Insider versions in first four to five months months are effectively alpha versions, and those at end (where MS go into bug testing mode) are Beta versions.
Nowhere in Insider Programme did MS ever state anything about state or reliability of Fast Ring versions. Indeed they give a big warning that they may be bugged and unstable and say not to join it if not willing to accept that.
So yes you did sign up for what we get. In the end, you do not have to participate, or could join Slow Ring etc.
Saying release version is Beta is not relevant to Insider Programme is just opinion. Everybody knows initial release of a new Program always has bugs.
Great!
So since you have been programming for over 25 years, you can with 100% confidence say that the term pre-ALPHA does not exist anywhere!?
What is it with you and the reminding me of that I have a choice? Of course I have a choice, we all do. That is obvious and does not need a constant reminder.
I might jump out of Insider Programme and start Beta testing Windows 10 latest release then. :) Beta testing, as Beta is what Windows 10 just qualifies for. The quality of todays software is far from what I would call stable and reliable. Heck...I have been running Alpha version applications that run more stable and reliably than this piece of junk.
Not to forget Edge browser...that is still Beta after many years of development, no matter what MS claims. Useless piece of crapware when one wants to have something reliable and be efficient in surfing the interwebs.
And NO this is not an opinion but is based on pure fact and statistics of thousands of user feedback and experiences. For instance at my local school they have over 250 computers of different architectures, old and new, and they all have issues. They simply refuse to work reliably. The same issue was on Windows 8.0-8.1 but less so. Windows 7, no issues at all.
So YES, by MY definition Windows 10 is still Beta, no matter if using Insider build or officially released builds.
Don't get me wrong though, MS has a great vision and a lot of awesome features. It is just the quality, that is very lacking. The final touch is missing, leaving some really big annoyances floating around from build to build. It has been like this since MS was created and it seems the same trend keeps continuing after tens of years in business.
I have been programming for 45 years, and never once have I heard term pre-alpha as a defined term. If people say that it is only an informal term like peole saying "I am sending you a gash copy of a document".
Given your indisputable skills and expertise which I fully recognise and admire, I do not really see why you are going on about release versions in same way as Insiders in this post which is about Insider versions.
If you have a beef about release quality, isn't that subject for a different thread?
Although I have the option of using either Internet Explorer or Google Chrome....99.5% of my surfing is done using, in my opinion a very reliable O/S in Edge, particularly for myself the advantages of being integrated with Cortana.
Have not got a clue as to why you and the 250 computers you claim at your local school are having issues.
As for quoting feedback to backup your claims this can sometimes be unreliable.....for example even in this forum certain members post about problems they have encountered, which I have not....logic suggests it can only be either conflicting architecture or self inflicted setups.
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