Question

I was wondering if anyone can suggest a third-party solution to do the following?

I’m a developer/freelancer. I need an online solution to let beta-testers and other developers communicate bug reports, submit feature requestes (from “internal” beta-testers, and just not software users) back and forth between our small team. Preferably the system that can be updated from both ends: developers – beta-testers, that could also keep history of all such communication.

Answer 1

I have a webform to a local mailbox that triggers a mail to my personal account when there’s something to read (that means: when unread inbox messages count changes from 0 to 1). When the message requires an answer I send an email to the user (users are required to provide a valid email on registration).

In extreme cases I leave a personal message to the user popping as a simple javascript alert next time he/she logs in or (if already logged in) requests a page. If I need to make sure he/she will read it I use confirm method and keep showing it in every page loaded until accept button is pressed.

You can set up a free online chat applet on a webpage to complement that. Check this one out, for example: http://www.phpfreechat.net/demo

Facebook also works quite good (instant messaging, posting to everybody).

A Blog with RSS (any CMS: wordpress, drupal… includes a number of modules to set up a blog in a minute with just a few wizard steps) is also a good way to communicate news and updates.

A Forum (phpBB for example) is very easy to set up, but more difficult to maintain (repeated posts, scattered info without structure, etc… It’s less resource efficient than other systems, in my opinion).

A wiki is a good solution for FAQs and user manuals. You can read more about it here: http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Wiki

A dedicated Q&A site can also be a good idea because people vote the most interesting and useful topics, but it has the same drawbacks as the forum, though they’re (in my opinion) easier to handle. There are many precooked Q&A opensource projects with almost if not all the functions you can find here on the stackexchange network, ready to deploy in a minute. I particularly like this one: http://www.question2answer.org/

A bugtracker is quite technical but it works as a charm with experienced users (If your beta testers belong to the programmers community don’t even think it twice: just have it online ASAP!). I like bugzilla, but you have many different ones to choose from. A comparison of bugtracking systems can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems

Finally, but not the less important, don’t discard deploying surveys, they’re very good to make statistics on your project’s weak and strong points and also on user experience and expectations (functionalities to add/improve and fix). Some sites like surveymonkey.com make this very easy.