alpha

A word referring to the first of two pre-release phases of a commercial software or hardware product. Alpha is the release prior to the beta test or beta version. Alpha releases still have lots of bugs, and some features may not even work. In a beta release, the software mostly works and the worst bugs have been fixed, but there may still be problems in some environments. More testing is needed. The final version that is ready for a live production enviroment is called the stable version, and should work as expected.