NeXtwork - the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank...!
Eating your own dog food
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, occurs when an organization uses its own product. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding demonstrates confidence in the developers' own products.
@andrarchy @ned @elipowell
Contents
1 Real world utilization
2 Origin of the term
3 Examples
4 Criticisms and support
5 Alternative terms
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
In 2006, the editor of IEEE Software recounted that in the 1970s, television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin he remembers is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.
Real world utilization[edit]
InfoWorld commented that this needs to be transparent and honest: "watered-down examples, such as auto dealers' policy of making salespeople drive the brands they sell, or Coca-Cola allowing no Pepsi products in corporate offices ... are irrelevant." In this sense, a corporate culture of not supporting the competitor is not the same as a philosophy of "eating your own dog food". The latter focuses on the functional aspects of the company's own product.
Dogfooding allows employees to test their company's products in real-life situations; a perceived, but still controversial, advantage beyond marketing, which gives management a sense of how the product might be used—all before launch to consumers. In software development, dogfooding can occur in multiple stages: first, a stable version of the software is used with just a single new feature added. Then, multiple new features can be combined into a single version of the software and tested together. This allows several validations before the software is released. The practice enables proactive resolution of potential inconsistency and dependency issues, especially when several developers or teams work on the same product.
The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.
Alternative terms[edit]
See also[edit]
Software prototyping
User innovation
Self-hosting
