Dogfooding found 22 bugs my 1,548 tests missed

Last week I found 86 orphaned processes eating 10.3 GB of RAM on my VPS. The week before that, my stall monitor fired because I went for a walk. And my own documentation tool told me my docs were stale. TL;DR: Real use of three open-source tools found 22 bugs that 1,548 automated tests missed. Bugs cluster in two categories: resource accumulation over time, and gaps between "works" and "works for me". Test suites check states. Dogfooding finds the transitions between them. None of these would show up in a test suite. I found them because I actually use my own tools - not as a testing practice, just because they solve problems I have. Test suites tell you if something works. Using your own product tells you if it's any good. Those are different questions with different answers. Joel Spolsky described this gap twenty-five years ago - he found 45 bugs in one Sunday afternoon of actually using CityDesk to run his blog. "All the testing we did, meticulously pulling down every menu and seein