From LQWiki
The beta release is a pre-release version of a software application, made available to a community of testers in the hope of finding and squashing bugs before the final release.
Increasingly common (particularly with complex software projects, which require more testing) are release candidates, which are an additional pre-release version that follows beta testing.
Historical note: This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.
See also
This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.
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