Eating your own dog food , also called dogfooding , is a slang term used to refer to scenarios in which an organization uses its own product. This could be a way for organizations to test their products in real-world use. Therefore dogfood can act as a quality control, and eventually a kind of advertising testimonial. Once in the market, dogfooding shows confidence in the developer's own product.
Video Eating your own dog food
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InfoWorld commented that this needs to be transparent and honest: "softened examples, such as car dealer policies, make sellers push for brands they sell, or Coca-Cola that does not allow Pepsi products in corporate offices... irrelevant. "In this sense, a corporate culture that does not support a competitor is not the same as the philosophy of" eating your own dog food ". The latter focuses on the functional aspects of the company's own products.
Dogfood allows employees to test their company's products in real-life scenarios; perceived, but still controversial, profit beyond marketing, which gives management a sense of how the product can be used - all before it's launched to the consumer. In software development, dogfood can occur in several stages: first, a stable version of the software is used with just one new feature added. Then, some new features can be merged into one software version and tested together. This allows some validation before the software is released. This practice allows potential proactive resolution of inconsistencies and dependency issues, especially when multiple developers or teams work on the same product.
The risk of public dogfood, particularly that the company may have difficulty using its own products, may reduce the frequency of published dogfood.
Maps Eating your own dog food
The origin of the term
In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, the test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled "Eat Our Dogfood alone", challenging it to increase internal use of company products. From there, the use of the term spreads through the company.
Dave Cutler's February 1991 insistence on dogfooding in the development of Windows NT at Microsoft is documented in Pascal Zachary's 1994 book, Showstopper! Breakneck Race for Creating Windows NT and Next Generation at Microsoft . Microsoft developed the operating system on a computer running NT daily build, initially text only, then with graphics, and finally with the network.
In 2006, the editor of IEEE Software reported that on a 1970s television commercial for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene showed that she fed Alpo to her own dog. Another possible recollection is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who is said to eat a can of dog food at a shareholder meeting.
There is also an English expression "Dog's Breakfast", which refers to making a mess of something (eg dinner) that is unattractive and almost unusable. In this context, "Eating Your Own Dogfood" means you will not run away from an unpleasant job. Instead of "going out for dinner", you stay and strangle the mess - thus making it disappear. This is a metaphor for the tedious and unpleasant work of near-finished product debugging.
Example
The development of Windows NT at Microsoft involves more than 200 developers in small teams, and it was co-hosted by Dave Cutler in February 1991 that insisted on dogfooding. Microsoft developed the operating system on a computer running NT daily builds. Initially accident-prone, but direct feedback from code that destroys buildings, loss of pride, and knowledge hinders the work of others are all powerful motivators. Windows developers will typically do their own dogfood or Windows hosting starting from an early version (alpha), while other employees will start from a more stable beta version that is also available for MSDN customers. In 2005, Infoworld reported that the Microsoft network operations center tour "shows pretty much without a doubt that Microsoft is running a 20,000-plus node, an international network on 99 percent of Windows technology, including servers, workstations, and edge security". InfoWorld is of the opinion that "the use of Microsoft Windows for high traffic operations that pat many doubts to the Windows side of the fence."
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft's internal mail system was originally developed around Unix. When asked why, they openly move to using Microsoft Exchange. In 1997, an email storm known as the Bedlam DL3 incident made Microsoft build a stronger feature into Microsoft Exchange Server to avoid missing and duplicate email and network and server downtime, although dogfood is rarely so dramatic. The second email storm in 2006 was handled perfectly by the system.
In 1999, Hewlett-Packard staff refers to projects that use HP's own products as "Project Alpo". Around the same time, Mozilla also practiced dogfood under that name.
Government green public procurement enabling testing of proposed environmental policies has been compared against dogfooding.
On June 1, 2011, YouTube added a licensing feature to a video uploading service that allows users to choose between standard or Creative Commons licenses. License labels followed by (Shh! - Internal Dogfood) messages that appear on all YouTube videos that do not have a commercial license. A YouTube employee confirms that this refers to an internally tested product.
Criticism and support
Forcing those who design products to actually use and rely on them are sometimes considered to improve quality and usability, but software developers may be blind to usability and may have the knowledge to make software jobs that will end the end users. Microsoft's chief information officer noted in 2008 that, previously, "We tend not to go through true customer experience.We always upgraded from beta, not from production disk to production disk." Dogfooding may occur too early to run, and those who are forced to use the product can assume that others have reported the problem or they may be used to implementing a solution. Dogfooding may not be realistic, because customers will always have a choice of different company products to use together, and the product should not be used as intended. This process can lead to loss of productivity and demoralization, or extreme to "Not Created Here" syndrome, ie using only internal products.
In 1989, Donald Knuth published a paper describing a lesson from his TeX Typesetting software development, where the benefits of the approach are mentioned:
So I came to the conclusion that the designers of the new system must not only be the first large-scale implementers and users; the designer must also write the user manual first. The separation of any of these four components will be detrimental to TeX significantly. If I do not participate fully in all these activities, hundreds of improvements will never happen, because I will never think of them or feel why it matters.
Alternate terms
In 2007, Jo Hoppe, CIO of Pegasystems, said that he used an alternative phrase "drinking our own champagne". Novell's head of public relations, Bruce Lowry, commented on the use of Linux by his company and OpenOffice.org, saying that he also prefers this phrase. In 2009, Microsoft's new CIO, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" is unattractive and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing the product as "the ice cream our customers want to eat". An alternative term that is less controversial and commonly used in some contexts is self-hosting, where a developer workstation will, for example, be updated automatically overnight to the latest daily build of the software or operating system they are working on. IBM mainframe operating system developers have long used the term "eat our own cuisine".
See also
- Software prototype creation
- The alpha test
- User innovation
- Hosting by yourself
References
External links
- What Does Dog Work In This Country? (Joel Spolsky on dogfood Fogbugz, Joel On Software , May 5, 2001)
- 'Laugh at dogfood' (Google dogfooding Blogger)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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