Eating your own dog food

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang to define a scenario in which a company (usually, a software company) uses its own created products.^[1]

Introduction

Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.^[2] For example, Microsoft and Google emphasize the internal use of their own software products, and at least for Microsoft, especially during the development stage: All employees corporate wide have access to either the daily builds of most products in development, for instance with automatic overnight updates, even for Windows operating system, or they can update manually to the stable Beta and Release Candidate builds before the product releases. The idea behind "eating your own dog food" is that if the company expects customers to buy its products, it should also be willing to use those products.^[3] 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."^[4] The risks of public failure when using a company's own products may explain the limited amount of public dogfooding.^[4] A perceived advantage beyond marketing is that it should allow employees to test the products in real, complex scenarios,^[3][5] and it gives management pre-launch a sense of progress as the product is being used in practice.^[5] In software products, the concepts of build branches, private (or buddy) builds and private testing allow one or several validation passes before the code is integrated with the normal daily builds. It leads to more stable builds, and pro-active resolution of some potential inconsistency and dependency issues, especially when several developers or teams work on the same product.

Origin

The editor of IEEE Software recounts that in the 1980s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.^[6]

In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled "Eating our own Dogfood", challenging him to increase internal usage of the company's product. From there, the usage of the term spread through the company.^[7][8]

Examples

Apple Computer president Michael Scott in 1980 wrote a memo announcing that "EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc." by the computer company, with a goal to eliminate typewriters by 1 January 1981.^[9]

The development of Windows NT at Microsoft involved over 200 developers in small teams, and it was held together by Dave Cutler's insistence in February 1991 on dogfooding, developing the operating system on computers running on NT using a daily build, initially text only, then with graphics, and finally with networking. It was initially crash prone, but the immediate feedback of code breaking the build, the loss of pride, and the knowledge of impeding the work of others were all powerful incentives.^[10][11] Infoworld reported in 2005 that a tour of Microsoft's Network operations center "showed pretty much beyond a reasonable doubt that Microsoft does run its 20,000-plus node, international network on 99 percent Windows technology, including servers, workstations, and edge security."^[12] InfoWorld argued that "Microsoft's use of Windows for its high-traffic operations tipped many doubters over to Windows' side of the fence". In the mid-1990s, Microsoft's internal email system was initially developed around Unix. When asked why, they publicly moved to using Microsoft Exchange.^[13] An email storm known as the Bedlam DL3^[14] incident in 1997 allowed Microsoft to build more robust features in Microsoft Exchange Server to avoid lost and duplicate emails and network and server down-time, although dogfooding is rarely so dramatic. A second email storm in 2006^[15] was perfectly handled by the system.

In 1999, Hewlett-Packard staff referred to a project using HP's own products as "Project Alpo".^[16]

When Time Warner merged with AOL in 2001, AOL's email system was adopted by the new AOL Time Warner, resulting in lost emails and productivity. Use of the system was discontinued.^[5]

Government green public procurement that allows testing of proposed environmental policies has been compared to dogfooding.^[17]

On June 1, 2011, YouTube added a license feature to its video uploading service allowing users to choose between a standard or Creative Commons license.^[18][19] The license label was followed by the message (Shh! - Internal Dogfood) that appeared on all YouTube videos lacking commercial licensing.^[20] A YouTube employee confirmed that this referred to products that are tested internally.^[21]

Criticism and alternative terms

Forcing those who design products to actually use and rely on them is often thought to improve quality and usability, but software developers may be blind to usability and may have knowledge to make software work that an end user will lack.^[5] Microsoft's chief information officer noted in 2008 that, previously, "We tended not to go through the actual customer experience. We were always upgrading from a beta, not from production disk to production disk."^[22] Dogfooding may happen too early to be viable, and those forced to use the products may assume that someone else has reported the problem or they may get used to applying workarounds. Dogfooding may be unrealistic, as customers will always have a choice of different companies' products to use together, and the product may not be being used as intended. The process can lead to a loss of productivity and demoralisation,^[5] or at its extreme to "Not Invented Here syndrome"; i.e., only using internal products.^[6]

In 2007, the CIO of Pegasystems said that she uses the alternate phrase "drinking our own champagne".^[23] Novell's head of public relations Bruce Lowry, commenting on his company's use of Linux and OpenOffice.org, said that he also prefers this phrase.^[24] In 2009, the new CIO of Microsoft, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" was unappealing and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing products as "ice cream that our customers want to consume."^[25]

See also

• Software prototyping
• Alpha test
• User innovation

References

External links

• What Is The Work Of Dogs In This Country? (Joel Spolsky on Fogbugz's dogfooding, Joel On Software, 5 May 2001)
• 'Chowing down on dogfood' - (Google dogfooding Blogger)