Dreamcoder in beta

Some time ago I contacted Mentat technologies about their product Dreamcoder, because I consider it to be a good tool with a great GUI. After I emailed a few enhancement requests and possible bugs, I asked them if I -being an Oracle Consultant- could join a beta test program, and help them where I could. To my surprise I was invited the next day by Karen Tyler, head of the Support Team.

Now my question about being a 'beta' tester. Does MT actually releases a beta-version of Dreamcoder? In other words, I did quite some betatesting before and was provided with pre-releases every two weeks, to debug and test the new enhancements or bugfixes.

The great thing about being a betatester is to be part of the development- and testing process and to see how improvements and fixes are implemented in new (pre)releases. I know that even after lots of testing during development and acceptance tests, bugs are found after the release has gone live.

Could it be possible to provide betatesters the (non-GA) releases, so things can be stresstested in a production environment? Although I believe that Dreamcoder is a very stable and reliable tool, it would be great to be part of the testing process and to help detecting bugs and test the solutions.

Answer:

Does MT actually releases a beta-version of Dreamcoder?
We hope release a beta-version on march 1of 2008 also we do not release more than one version month by month because we want to provide a considerable number of features to check.

Could it be possible to provide betatesters the (non-GA) releases, so things can be stresstested in a production environment?
Yes, it could. We are redefining our beta tester program to release different versions of our product for specific environments.

Answered by
Gustavo Cardona Ramirez
Moderator - Mentat Technologies