174 ◾ Software Engineering: The Current Practice
developers. As the defects are discovered, the developer team fixes them while the
testing team continues the testing.
In the beta release, select outside users are involved; sometimes these users are
called beta testers. Very often these users are selected because of their loyalty and
technical prowess. ey understand the tentative nature of the program verifica-
tion, report the bugs they find, and suggest software improvements. ere may
be a special contract between software developers and beta testers that contains
a reduced software price (or may even pay for their service), nondisclosure agree-
ments, and so forth.
Finally, when bugs reported from the alpha and beta releases are fixed, there ...