Test your software first thing in the morning. That’s when you’re the freshest and the most motivated to continue building something good.

During the day, we spend so much effort building software that we lose steam testing each piece we write. It gets hard to see the big picture as the day wears on. By late afternoon, we’re too close to the software. Our perception of what makes sense or feels right now competes with fatigue. Also, fatigue makes us miss the small details.

Should this feature be here or there? Should we move this function to another screen? Will this make sense? Is this latest tweak really that important? At 5 p.m. (or, for the truly overworked, 2 a.m.), it’s hard to know what our software feels like because we’ve been at it for too long.

However, at 9 a.m., fresh from a night’s sleep, we can usually answer these questions better. Our mental cobwebs are gone. Before diving into the build, this is the best time to give our software the once-over.

In the morning, our software feels new again. We approach it less fettered by what’s behind the scenes. We can consume it from a less biased viewpoint because we’ve had that time away.

The morning has a way of making us forget some of the copious details of code we may have obsessed about the night before. No longer preoccupied with the slightly inelegant implementation that made something work, our minds are totally devoted to what we see in front of us rather than thinking about what’s happening underneath.

When you test, start from the beginning. Don’t dig into a particular section. Just experience it again. The night before, you may have been working on a piece of functionality that a real user may use only once or twice...or never. In the morning, focus on the things most people will use most of the time. It’s a much better way to focus on the priorities of your software and focus on what needs fixing first.

Testing your software in the morning, before adding more code, is a great way to make sure you’re still making good software. It’s when you’re the freshest.