First of all, a big thankyou to all who have tried the FB4 beta and also to those people who completed our quality survey!
Here are some of the results from the survey:
Have you tried the FinalBuilder 4 beta yet?
83% Yes, 17% No
[Wow... that's awesome! Out of that, probably about 70% of people were using the latest build at the time.]
How do you rate the overall quality of the beta so far?
91% High/Very High, 9% Moderate/Low/Very Low
[Not too bad - especially considering that quite a lot of people aren't on the latest beta build]
Please rate the stability of FinalBuilder 4 beta.
91% High/Very High, 9% Moderate/Low/Very Low
[Very similar to the overall quality, with the exception that the spread between High and Very High was different, the percentage of Very High was higher]
Have you tried running any production builds with FinalBuilder 4 yet?
69% Yes
[This was very surprising to us, and is really excellent news. It means that the FB4 beta is getting a very good workout, not just a quick look]
Did FinalBuilder 4 successfully import your projects from previous versions?
We're aiming for 100% here, but there were 4 projects which weren't imported from earlier versions. The JediVCS support was missing from an earlier beta version so this probably accounts for a couple at least. One customer reported that an FB2 project containing SourceSafe didn't work correctly, but that has now been resolved. If anyone has any backwards compatibility issues, please let us know.
Do you think FinalBuilder 4 is a compelling upgrade over previous versions?
80% was Definitely Yes or Cautiously Yes. Only one person answered Definitely Not and only one person answered Probably Not. So, this is pretty encouraging. It was very interesting what people answered for the “best new feature in FB4“; the answers were very mixed, but if I had to pick a winner it would be the ASync group. But, pretty much all the new features got at least one mention - great news.
What area or areas is the quality lacking?
Did we have to ask this question? Documentation comes out on top... and yes, we are adressing this. Many of the other problems that were reported had already been fixed in a later build, and some of the answers were slightly too vague for us to do anything about, eg. “UI“ and “some actions could be improved“.
We're planning to conduct another survey just before we release FB4 - and hopefully we'll see some kind of improvement :)
Overall, this has been quite a useful exercise for us. It's really good to get feedback on the quality of the beta, and we get lots of feature requests, bug reports, and just very honest comments and opinions in these surveys.