dogfooding

[Dave Wilton]

"Dogfooding" doesn't just apply to formal testing or development. You dogfood when you use your own products. The idea is that employees who use the product in the course of their duties will be able to find problems and ideas for new features that ordinary testing won't uncover. It's not just developers who dogfood. If you produce a database product, dogfooding is when you use that database in your marketing, sales, HR, and accounting departments. You can dogfood a beta or a released product.

I suppose if you produced development tools, you could dogfood by using those tools to create new versions of the product. But I've never worked for a tools company, so I've never heard it in that particular context. And no one would ever think of writing a program using MS Word. A developer might dogfood using it to write the documentation, but not the program itself. You'd use a text editor like Emacs (or its Windows equivalent) that doesn't insert all sorts of extraneous crap into the file and which can be integrated into a larger suite of development tools.

"Alpha testing" is an extremely common usage. Alpha testing is usually done on an incomplete product, one that is missing significant features and has known critical bugs, but has the core functionality in place. You can't really dogfood an alpha product. It is too incomplete and buggy to be used normally, but enough is in place to do formal testing. Late stage alphas, which are almost beta, could be dogfooded.



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at netscape.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 6:38 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: dogfooding

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

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