Insomnia Consulting Still searching for an interesting slogan

Testing is what we do to make sure our decisions are sound.  Peter Drucker said that every decision should have a test to make sure it was a good decision (The Essential Drucker; Drucker, Peter, 2001, p. 250)..  Sounds like Test Driven Development.. but I don't want to digress.
 
When we create a product, we make almost constant decisions.  Some feature should be included, another feature left out, a third feature limited to just its basic components; each of these decisions need to be tested to make sure it was the right decision so that we can learn from our failures and appreciate our successes.
 
What would a test for a product decision look like?  ROI isn't particularly helpful because the profitability in a software release comes from the aggregate of all the features, and isn't granular enough to make specific pronouncements about each individual feature.
 
Cindy Alvarez posted a list of resources to help measure usage patterns in an application (http://bit.ly/53xUW5).  Many software applications report usage patterns back to the authoring company to help them learn how their software is being used.  Web applications can be analyzed using web logs, or even Google Analytics.  Desktop applications are a little more problematic, but if the tools for capturing usage data can be built into those applications.
 
What about testing the decisions before they've been implemented (writing the tests before the code, so to speak)?