Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding"

 Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services.^[1] This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers' confidence in their own products.^[2][3]

Origin of the term

[edit]

In 2006, Warren Harrison, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Software recounted that in the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, spokesperson and actor Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin he remembered was that the president of Kal Kan Pet Food was said to eat a can of his dog food at annual shareholders' meetings.^[4][5]

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.^[6][7]

Real world usage

[edit]

InfoWorld commented that this needs to be a transparent and honest process: 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.^[8] 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,^[3][9] which gives management a sense of how the product might be used—all before launch to consumers.^[9] 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.^{[citation needed]}

The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.^[8]