It does make a difference whether you are just developing or using it

After the first day using Savila I can say that it does make a difference whether you are just developing a product for someone else or you are using it yourself. Within a few hours of real use we could find a larger number of bugs or other inconsistencies that we simply were not aware of before. You can write unit tests, integration tests, even use automated UI testing with tools like Selenium, but that way you only can verify expected behavior. You can't find out whether something really makes sense. For that you have to use the product yourself trying to get real work done. Running it day in and out within your development environment is not the same.

In the case of our upcoming product Savila, we can be the developers and stakeholders at the same time. Developing custom software for clients makes it a bit more difficult. The developers cannot easily slip into the role of a stakeholder. The only way for "using" it is to provide the stakeholders new iterations of the product in short time. But that's not so easy as it sounds and requires a customer who embraces agile thinking himself.

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