Pretend Your Users Sat Next to You Everyday

I’m very much a “The tests pass. Ship it.” kind of guy. I like to fail fast and have long believed that the best way to find places where we missed a requirement or made a mistake is to get it into the hands of real users as quickly as possible. Recently however, the users are the folks sitting right next to me. I don’t mean a Product Owner either, I mean my team mates, my fellow devs. This has begun to really change my perspective a bit. 

You see, we’re not building software. Sure, we are building software, but that piece is inconsequential. What matters is the output of that software, not the software itself. It’s just a means to an end, which also means that we operate the system, we’re its users. The ultimate form of eating your own dog food, if you will. 

This means that if I break something, I not only have someone breathing down my neck, but I’ve also directly hurt my team and slowed us down. Obviously, this has given me lots of good reason to slow down and test a bit more thoroughly (manually, exploratorily) than I have in the past. I hope to continue to care this much about my users when they no longer sit right next to me again. 

So dear reader, my challenge to you: Don’t treat your users like testers or guinea pigs. Treat them like you’d treat them if they sat next to you, worked with you, everyday. I’m willing to bet you’d delight them that much more. 

Until next time,

Semper Cogitet