Moonlight will begin conducting beta testing of the first iteration of its NEO-based freelance working platform on Monday, September 30th. The first beta (dubbed “beta one”) testing group will be relatively small, with around eight individuals following “guided experiences.”

The beta one test will be the first time outside participants will use Moonlight’s platform and provide feedback. In a conversation with NEO News Today, Moonlight architect and co-founder, Tyler Adams, stated: “This is our third (or maybe fourth) round of customer feedback, but the first with the application in user’s hands.”

Beta one marks an essential milestone after nearly a year of development following a public token sale that concluded in August 2018.

Moonlight’s development history

In the development of its platform, Moonlight has three product-focused swimlanes: Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Additionally, the team has also been collaborating with NEO ecosystem partners to design a digital identity standard in the Constellation swimlane.

Copernicus, is currently ongoing and entails the creation of digital profiles for platform users. User profiles are the first step in creating customized resumes that can be used to apply for different categories of employment. Users will have the ability to create multiple profiles to customize their resumes and job applications. Additionally, “identity anchors” can provably tie platform user identities to their job applications via third-party providers.

Kepler, will focus on designing and building a talent recruitment portal, which will offer a marketplace and tie into various social aspects of the platform. In the Kepler swimlane, Moonlight will incrementally develop trustless resumes, flexible payment options, and a matchmaking engine.

The Galileo swimlane, will primarily focus on delivering project management tools, including support for collaboration between multiple teams, smart contracts, and web APIs.

While the aforementioned swimlanes focus on specific UI/UX segments of the platform, Constellation has been in development throughout 2019. Constellation is a “universal blockchain identity initiative,” which is under development amongst a consortium comprised of Moonlight, COZ, NEO Global Development, and other NEO-based entities. Constellation strives to offer a standard for decentralized identity and reputation.

Beta one testing

The first round of testing aims to refine features designed in the Copernicus swimlane. There will be two unique workflows, which are based on the professional role of the tester, and primarily focus on user-profiles and data warehousing. Moonlight seeks to ensure its profile and warehousing model is intuitive for users. Adams stated, “this is a core functionality of the platform, and everything else depends on it.”

Beta one is limited to eight participants and testing will take the form of a guided experience. In the guided experience, each participant will spend about one hour going through a user-tailored walkthrough of Moonlight.

Overall, Moonlight has identified an array of 20 unique personas, which represent core user archetypes. The small group of beta testers each represent a core platform persona, such as hiring managers, recruiters, engineers, designers, and marketers.

All beta one guided experiences are tentatively expected to conclude by the third week of October.

Looking Forward

For future beta testing, Moonlight will utilize the beta spiral method where each successive round will incorporate more features and include more participants.

Currently, the team is already implementing features into beta two testing, which Moonlight aims to have ready shortly after the conclusion of beta one.

A public beta, where the NEO community may have the opportunity to participate, could be ready in Q1 or Q2 of next year. However, Adams said, “that will heavily depend on the feedback we receive from this (and the later) closed beta experiences.”