What is the role of a test user that you invited to test your app and how do you handle communication with them?
We have a bit of a quarrel in our team around this topic. Here is what happened without going into much detail:
We are developing a new social network and are in the alpha stage right now. To test our app we invited over 100 people from our group of friends and people we know, including a few users via advertising. Every user was invited with the premise that the app is in the alpha stage and that we need them to test our app and give us feedback in the form of bug reports and feature requests.
What led to the quarrel was the fact that one of the team members used the fixed user tagging to tag the user that reported it was not working. He tagged the user in the comments of a "post" and got tagged back with the user confirming it worked now.
Some team members got pissed that this interaction happened.
We are split on what the role of our test users are and what we can and/or should expect of them. Should the communication be one sided or two sided?
Some of us think the users should test the app and if they find a bug or need a feature use the feedback form in the app to report them. And that is all they are supposed to do.
Another part of our team thinks that is not enough and we should be more proactive in how we interact with the test users. Ask them if the bug they reported is fixed or what they think of the new implemented features.
Are there any guidelines for this that are good practice? I couldn't find anything useful for our problem.