New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

One of the big reasons why software is so often pretty much unusable is because nobody cares to use it while it is getting developed. Developers don't use it, testers don't use it (testing is not using it), project managers don't use it and worst of all, even the clients don't use it. Yes, early stage software is buggy, crashes and is hard to use, but there is absolutely no excuse for not "dogfooding" (as we used to say in Microsoft) your own software. If you can't use it how can you expect somebody else to use it? Many times, even clients are loathe to test out alpha builds. They will give it a quick spin but then forget about it until the next update is provided to them. Bad idea. Marc is an exception to this rule. He loves pounding on alpha code. This makes developing People Aggregator (you can sign up for an invite now btw) all the more fun. Right now we are in a weekly update mode where we put out a new build every Tuesday. Then all of us spend the rest of the week really playing with it. A lot of bugs are found only with "real world" use.

So here is my message to all of you out there who are in any way involved in developing software: Use your software folks! Don't think you are building it for somebody else so you don't need to use it! If you can't use it, nobody else can!