No beta survives contact with testers unchanged. A step turns out to be confusing, two tasks are in the wrong order, someone spots a typo on day two. So Stomio lets you edit a beta while it's running, but it won't let your half-finished edits reach testers by accident.
Once you understand how that split works, editing a live beta stops being nerve-racking.
In this article
- Your edits are saved, not published
- Publishing your changes
- Discarding your changes
- The stages of a project
Your edits are saved, not published
Editing a live beta means editing its draft. Everything you type is saved as you go, so closing the tab loses nothing, but testers carry on seeing the published version until someone publishes yours.
The draft belongs to the beta rather than to you. Every manager on the beta works on the same one, and the moment you change something, they see it. If a colleague has been in there recently, you'll get a note at the top of the editor naming them and suggesting you coordinate. It's only a warning, though. Nothing stops two of you editing at the same time.
This is also the answer to "I changed it and nothing happened". Nine times out of ten the change is sitting in the draft, unpublished.
Publishing your changes
Publishing sends everything in the draft to your testers in one go.
There's one thing that will stop you: your tasks have to be error-free. Leave something half-configured and you'll get "Your project contains errors, you cannot publish" along with a shortcut to go and find them. Annoying in the moment, better than a broken step landing in front of live testers.
When it goes through you'll get a confirmation with a Notify testers shortcut, which takes you to the announcements page. Use it. Nothing tells testers that a task changed, so an update you don't announce is one most of them will never notice. See Send Announcements to Your Testers.
Discarding your changes
Sometimes the edit was a mistake and you want to get back to whatever testers are currently seeing. That's Discard changes.
Before anything disappears, Stomio shows you a confirmation listing what's about to go, task by task and step by step. Read it. Three things about discarding catch people out:
- It applies to the whole beta, not the task you happen to have open. Every unpublished change in the project goes, so the three tasks you edited last week go along with today's one.
- It applies to everyone's changes. The draft is shared, so a colleague's unfinished work disappears with yours, whether or not you knew it was there.
- There's no undo. No second confirmation, no recovery.
That last pair is why the list is worth a few seconds. If you see a task named that you never touched, someone else is mid-edit, and the right move is to close the dialog and go and ask them about it.
And if you only want to undo part of what you did, hit Keep editing and reverse those specific changes yourself.
The discard confirmation listing every unpublished change in the beta
The stages of a project
A beta moves through a set of stages, and mostly you don't set them by hand. Apart from pausing and archiving, the stage follows from the start and end dates you gave it, and changes on its own as those dates arrive.
- Draft, where you're still building and haven't set a schedule. Testers you add aren't contacted, so this is the time to get your roster and your tasks together in peace. Nobody outside the beta's managers can see it, viewers included.
- Published, meaning it has a start and end date, and the start date hasn't arrived. This one gets misread a lot, so there's more on it below.
- Active, once the start date has passed. Testers are working through the tasks, and this is where everything above about publishing and discarding applies.
- Paused, stopped part way through its date window. Testers can't carry on until you hit Resume in the beta's options menu.
- Finished, once the end date is behind you. Nothing new comes in, but everything stays readable.
- Archived, filed away, still readable, and restorable whenever you want it back.
What Published actually means
Published means the beta is committed and scheduled, with the starting gun still to fire.
It's the moment the beta becomes real to everyone who isn't editing it. Invitations go out to the testers you added while it was a draft, so they can accept and join. Your opt-in link starts working, so people can sign themselves up. And viewers can see the beta for the first time, which is worth remembering, because a draft is completely invisible to them, even if you send them a direct link to it. If a stakeholder tells you a beta has gone missing, check whether it's been published yet.
What hasn't happened is the beta starting. Your testers can be in, ready and waiting, while the tasks stay closed until the start date arrives and the beta turns Active.
You'll find these transitions in the beta's options menu, the ••• button, alongside Pause and Resume, Duplicate as a draft, Archive this project or Restore this project, and Delete.
Duplicate as a draft deserves more use than it gets. If you run the same program every quarter, duplicating a finished beta hands you the whole task structure again as a fresh draft, and leaves the original and its results untouched.