Do you use pre-release software to develop commercial products?

Question

So the question is.. have you used a pre-release product or technology (a Community Technology Preview, Beta or Release Candidate, etc) to develop your own product with?

For example, you might have developed a website using Microsoft's ASP.Net MVC (which just went RTM yesterday) or built software against SQL Server 2008 RC 1..etc

If so..

1. What steps do you (or did you) take to minimise the risk of problems occuring when the pre-release product is properly released?

2. Do you wait a specific timeframe (until a product is a Release Candidate, for example) before working with a product?

3. What would be the main advantages (vs. risk) of working with pre-release technologies?

Answer 1

Practically all successful software projects I've ever been on have been released (erm, published - web sites) with a fair amount of betas in use.

We mainly evaluate the test-coverage of these (mostly open source projects) and the previous track record for not doing stupid things.

Any old beta will do as long as it does what we need ;) But usually we stay off the immediate snapshots after major rewrites.

These days we're test driven, so we know if our stuff works. If the libraries have bugs we stay with an older version or fix the bugs. We can also assess immediately if an update has serious bugs in it, because it will break our own tests. So using "unfinished" software is really not a big deal any more. Access to the latest features is always the reason, sometimes we do it to get important fixes.