That’s what I learned this week. Fortunately I made the right decision.
When a developer’s blog falls silent, you can expect that he is working ridiculous hours getting a new product or point release ready to ship. Or at least you can expect that in my case. After 36 months of work over a four-year period, I have my first application almost ready for the beta testers to tear to shreds.

The temptation to release the beta now sits on my shoulder every day while I work. “You can write the help files while you wait for the responses,” it coos. “Go ahead. You’ve frozen the feature set. You’ve cleared all the FIX MEs. Release the beta. You’ll feel so good when you do.”

From my other shoulder I hear, “But you want the testers to evaluate your help files, too. Well-written help makes the beta that much more impressive.”

For the last few days I’ve been working on writing Help, and I’m ever so glad I didn’t release the beta. What I’ve learned is that writing Help makes you exercise every feature of your app, including the ones you’ve broken while fixing something else. Typically I write for half an hour, then spend four hours fixing the bugs I’ve discovered. Foolish me, I thought I had found all the obvious bugs. Ha! I wasn’t even close.

When I think about all the bug reports that would have come back, I shudder. Writing help files is not much fun, but it’s invaluable as a way of giving your app a once-over before you release it to testing.