what happened to the alpha and beta naming and v0.4 etc of apps?
it's universal. everyone generally understands that terminology.

My suggestions for making the testing of apps better are:

have a dummy hello world type app for noobs and first time testers to help which covers some of the basic functions apps could have. have a guide what to check and they can learn etc.

have an application that takes system snapshots. (see my previous post page 5) maybe have it as a bug tracker app, allowing quick feedback to maemo.org

allow people to tag an app as testing it so a user can see who and how many people have downloaded it to test and they can message each other about tests they have run etc (already implamented)

Make it easier to do things, 1 login rather then 3 for the site. it just gets annoying. people will get lazy and just not bother because they have to make another account.

when i get my n900 i'd like to help in testing apps and making it so people who just want a cool phone are able to take part without being a nix hacker, majority of people are from a windows background and haven't really scratched dos or scripting. Theres more user's then developers in the world so making it easy for them to test safely is ideal, gives people who can develop more time to do the more advanced testing and developing