You may notice with our upcoming release of energy-rating tool Hero that it is designated as an Accredited Beta product.

So what’s a Beta and why is Hero Software’s initial release tagged as an Accredited Beta product?

What’s a Beta?

In software development, a Beta is a term that indicates a software release that still requires some further testing & improvement to be considered a Production or Stable release. Popular applications like Google’s Gmail app remained in a public Beta state for many years prior to dropping the tag.

Hero’s Accredited Beta

So what’s Hero’s “Accredited Beta” phase about? Lets break that into it’s two parts, Accredited & Beta

Accredited

Hero has recently been issued NatHERS Accreditation as an energy-rating tool, indicating that the tool can be used to issue NatHERS Certificates accepted throughout Australia. This is the core purpose of Hero so we want to emphasise to users that while Hero is a continual work-in-progress, the tool is currently ready to be used to model & certify projects for NatHERS purposes.

Beta

Energy-modelling programs like Hero are complex applications, being a mix of CAD & engineering tools. As a recent release, there are items that require further polish, improvement & fixing to get Hero to a level we’re happy with. To this end, our initial release is a Beta to indicate to users that there may be some teething issues. We expect over the next 6 months as we address these issues that we will move to a typical production schedule.

Certificate Fees

We realise that transitioning, training & re-tooling to a new NatHERS Energy-modelling program may be an investment in time & resources for your business. We also recognise that during our Accredited Beta phase, our users may encounter the odd issue, bug or lack of support documentation.
In acknowledgement of the above our NatHERS Certificate Fees will be reduced by 25% to $22.50 (exc GST) during Hero’s Beta period.

Support

During Beta, you may encounter the odd issue or bug. For the next few months, Hero Software are laser-focused on addressing those issues but we’d love to know when they occur for you. So please submit any bugs on our Hero Support Desk. A list of existing bugs as well as User suggestions & ideas are listed on our Trello roadmap page.