dogfooding

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

On Mon, 5 Dec 2011 06:32:07 -0800 Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

>posted on here:
>
>http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/short-shot-31-dogfood/
>
>(but without any research on its origin)

The post begins:

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes to report hearing “an employee of a large local company” say “I’ve been dogfooding for a while already”, meaning that he’d been betatesting a new product of his company’s. It turns out that the verbing dogfood has been around for a while in the tech world, though eat one’s own dogfood seems to be the original.  <snip rest of blog post>

"betatesting" is the wrong word.  A product, generally software, is in "beta test" when it is released to a restricted group of customers for them to review and find bugs.  Presumably in-house testing is "alpha testing", although I personally can't recall ever hearing the phrase.

Difference between "alpha testing" and "dogfooding"?  Yes.  If you write a program to compute stresses in a steel bridge, you will alpha-test it.  But you cannot write the thing in itself.  A piece of software like Microsoft Windows, or Microsoft Word, can be used to create new versions of itself, hence can be "eaten" by requiring the developers to use Windows or Word as the tool for all development of new versions of Windows or Word.  Note that dogfooding requires the existence of a usable early version of the software to write later versions in.

    - James A. Landau

_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org