Dogfood

eating your own dogfood means being a user of your own code. being both the user and the developer.
- user empathy comes automatically.

The practice of using your own prodicts or services.
act of quality control
a kind of testimonial advertising.
can demonstrate develops confidence in their own product.
The practice enables proactive resolution of potential inconsistency and dependency issues, especially when several developers or teams work on the same product.
origin of term
- https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2006/03/s3005/13rRUygBwg0
criticism
- The people who make the product (developers) may not be the best people to understand the end users.

It's not just about testing your app.
It's about putting yourself in your users' shoes and see things from their perspective.
- Something that needs to be embedded in your culture to unlock it's potential.
- Using your app in a real-world environment for the same purpose and in the same way your end-users would.
You need to define your target audience.
- and close you are with them.
- you need to make sure that the feedback you get from dogfooding is in line with what the users are thinking.
  - otherwise you are risking building a tool that fits your team, but not the end users.
Your team is a lot more familiar with your app than your customers are.
- You need a fresh set of eyes to view your product in this case.
it is natural for your team to be biased towards the app
dogfooding is great but it's not a replacement for proper QA testing.
if your app does a very specific / specialized task and cannot be adapted to you, it is best to avoid dogfooding as it will likely give a false feedback.
doing it too early when the product is immature may backfire as well. In this case dogfooding could be more of an obstacle.

Lorne Greene was a pitchman for Alpo dog food and showed a commercial that he fed Alpo to his dogs.
The president of Kal Kan Pet Food would eat a can of the company's dog food at the annual shareholder's meeting.
At some point "dog food" became a verb.
The software industry has adopted the phrase to mean that they use their own products.
evidence that the company has confidence in its own software.
- pitfalls:
  - they are getting it for free.
  - ultimately, the people who select what software gets used are more likely to be the ones paying for it than the ones using it.
finding bugs through dogfooding
- makes you wonder how confident the company is in its testing and QA process.
  - may actually reduce confidence in testing.
companies using only their product may not be able to realize alternative approaches exists.
- failing to appreciate and respect good features of other companie's tools.
peer pressure to use your teams product
- arrogance/cluelessness of competitors can grow in your team
- could lead to Hapsburg jaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognathism)
Not Invented Here syndrome.
- scarce resources might get allocated to building tools taht could easily be purchased from others.