Monday, July 13, 2009

Dogfood

The company where I spent my vacation has a very strong tradition of "eating one's own dogfood," which means using the products they are developing. This is supposed to improve the quality of the product, because one becomes painfully aware of the problems and is motivated to fix them.

My recollection is that when I first heard the phrase, back in the early 1990s, it was "tasting," not "eating," one's own dogfood. There is a significant difference between the two.

The problem with eating only your own dogfood is that you start getting used to the taste of dogfood, and you don't discover that the rest of the world has learned how to cook a decent meal.

Maybe it is better to eat whatever the best food around is, while occasionally being forced to taste one's own dogfood. For example, let development teams use whatever products they want, but have test days where the teams work through predefined customer use cases using their own products.