dogfooding

Tue Dec 6 13:56:28 UTC 2011

Here is an instance of "dogfooding" in 1997. The writer is discussing
the use of the programming tool VC++ internally by Microsoft. The
writer also suggests an explanation for the phrase.

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.vc.mfc/msg/1a4b353ccc5129a2

Short link: http://goo.gl/hpjGi

[Begin excerpt]

Newsgroups: microsoft.public.vc.mfc
From: "David Conger" <dcon... at roadshow.com>
Date: 1997/02/13
Subject: Re: Will VB5 start killing off Visual C++ ?

>...
>    Do they write Visual C++ using Visual C++??
>...

Supposedly Microsoft practices something called "dogfooding" wherein
portions of a still-in-development release of VC++ that are up and
working are used to complete the rest of the release. The idea being
that late stage development tasks can't proceed if the early stage
tasks were not done correctly.

The term "dogfooding" comes from the idea that a dog food manufacturer
ought to be willing to eat the food he produces -- a kind of hard-core
quality assurance method.

[End excerpt]

The phrase "drink our own champagne" is an alternative used by some
people involved with software. Here is an instance in 2002. The
connotations of this phrase are diverse.

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.ingres/msg/fa5b8677509980ab

Short link: http://goo.gl/n75jH

[Begin excerpt]
Newsgroups: fa.ingres
From: calja03 <mem... at dbforums.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 18:17:39 GMT
Local: Wed, Dec 18 2002 1:17 pm
Subject: Re: futur of Ingres

... New projects are being developed on Advantage Ingres and if we at
CA are happy to use it (we drink our own champagne!) then your client
can be confident that not only is Ingres is here to stay, but it's as
good as it ever was. ...

Jim Callaghan
Marketing Program Manager, Computer Associates.
[End excerpt]

Found with a quick search and simple pattern; antedatable.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 7:27 AM, Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dave Wilton <dave at WILTON.NET>
> Subject:      Re: dogfooding
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "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
>
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