A novel approach to testing - actually USE your product...

Recently on the IntelliJ forums there was a comment that the Jetbrains guys use IDEA as their IDE for developing IDEA, some one replied saying "you actually use IDEA to write IDEA?" as thou it was a strange concept....

Personally, I can't think of a better way to further test and improve your own product - than by actually using it.  You get to find what iritates you, those small things that drive you crazy, and you can start to identify things that would make your daily usage of said product better.  Sure you may introduce bugs that only others find, but thats the natural course of development I find - if others are using your product, you'll get strange configs and odd installs that'll highlight, and break your code for you...

A few years ago when working for Time Disciple I was working on an electronic timesheet/project management system, we also used the system inhouse as a own timesheet, issue tracking, project management system.  I found that by actually using the product on a daily basis, I soon found all those little niggly things that I wanted to fix or improve, quite often I found myself muttering under my breath "gah, this sucks, why should I have to it this way...." which usually resulted in my manager saying "well its your project, if you can improve it, do it."  For all the greatness of the product, the UI suffered from complexity in a few places that I soo wish I could fix, and I would have, if I had the time outside any of the "real" work I was doing on the codebase.

But my main point remains, when I joined the company, the project had already had 4-5 people working on it in the past, but by using the program daily, I learnt more about the system and how things worked than if I was just running it as part of my tests.  By using it daily, we pretty quickly found any little glitch or gremlin that somehow found its way into the codebase.

And whilst I do wish I'd made more use of DUnit at the time, it was one of the best ways of testing the system I could ever find.

So - do you use your own applications?

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