“What’s “Mozilla Alpha”? Well, Alpha comes before Beta. And Beta
traditionally means that you think your software is mostly feature
complete (maybe there are one or two late-breaking features
scheduled for a second beta). More important, Beta means you are
ready to inflict your software on a very large number of your
end-users.”
“We’re not at Beta yet, but with any luck, we’ll be far
enough along at the M12 release, or soon after, that we’re all
happy calling it “Mozilla Alpha”. How will we know when we’re
there? Of course, there’s the general “I’ll know it when I see it”
test. But we’d also like to have some more objective Alpha criteria
to work with.“
“So here’s our proposal for Mozilla Alpha release criteria. Let
us know what you think. We’re especially interested in whether you
believe these are appropriate and adequate criteria, or whether we
should use other and better metrics. And please tell us anything
else important that we haven’t thought of so far.”