Don’t underestimate the power of beta testing to a wide range of people. Consider it collaborative development. Open your software to a broad range of people inside and outside of your target market and you’ll be amazed at what you get back from them.

A perfect example is my current project MioWorks.com. We opened up for public beta testing a couple weeks ago. In that time we have been getting amazing feedback that has allowed us to direct our development resources to the must have features of a target set of users.

Now you can’t just run off and implement every feature that is throw at you by the beta group. But you can listen to them as a whole and look for trends and commonalities. For us, we knew that we needed to implement ways to improve data manipulation and the feedback gave us the exact path to take. As we complete the development and roll it out, we are extremely confident that this effort will be well received by our beta group.

So open yourself up to critique and criticism early in the process.  You may also want to adopt some not-so-traditional approaches by using social media.  We encourage our beta group to use Twitter to spout off feature needs and questions in real time - all they have to do is respond @Mioworks and we collect that data and use it in our analysis and product planning.

In the end, no matter how you do it, building software should be a collaborative process that takes into account your target market.