Alpha, Beta, Gamma *err* Final...

Aside from being Greek characters, they often occur in software engineering.
So what is so special about them? What they are used for, what is the meaning of them?
Why does ACE released successful a Beta and I failed?
What is so difficult to determinate a final version and what means Don't think Beta?

...

So what means Alpha and Beta in software engineering. At the beginning of the engineering we encounter a demonstration. But since we don't need a backer, this is mostly skipped

Next step is the Alpha: This is the major phase. In this phase the software is being created. As soon as someone adds (major) features to the software, the software will be in the Alpha phase.

Once every major feature has been added, the project will switch to Beta. In this phase the aim is to get the product stable and solve as many bugs as possible. At this point we already can tell the difference between ACE and RTE. ACE already left the Alpha phase, the RTE didn't. I still added major features, even after I presented it as beta.

Once every bug was found, the software will declared final

Bad joke? OK, true, most software can't be bug free. There exists bug-free software like "Hello world" But as soon as the software gets more complex, it will get hard to track all errors. This is even more complex for us nonprofessionals since we lack of (professional) Beta tester, so we need to test it our self.
Problem: We can't test our software our self!

Why do we can't test our software?
We know how our code should work, we only use it the way it was designed for. We can't think the way to create a bug. If we could, we had added a workaround a long time before. So we can only ensure that every function will work as it should, but we can't find bugs which are caused by a different behavior.

OK, I was to lazy to check every function and thought that they work as planned since no one reported a bug in the last month. But as you can see in the changelog category: There are some bugs in the RTE and some of them were major...
So I also failed in the last phase... Hmm, did I had a success in at least one phase? Hard to answer, at least I'm trying to solve the bugs, so keep reporting
This will increase the stability in A2.

But what is about Don't think Beta?
Releasing something as a Beta shouldn't be an excuse that it contains bugs:

<A>: There is a bug when doing this and that.
<B>: That's why it was released as a Beta!

Releasing a Beta doesn't mean that you will stumble over bugs. Beta only means that you are searching for the remaining bugs so you can remove them for final.

A Beta is only for bug fixing! No excuse to release something unstable to public!