Eating your own dog food is a strategy often proposed to help companies produce better products. Using your own software exposes you to flaws that you might not otherwise find — intensive, day-to-day usage can highlight annoyances and bugs that even the most robust test scripts cannot. This makes a strategy of internal use particularly powerful to identify usability issues.
I think that what is being missed is what an opportunity eating your own dog food can be for accessibility as well. Web application developers should take a day a month, switch off all Javascript, possibly even swap into Lynx (or similar “no frills” browser) and try using their applications as normal. One could do the same from a mobile browser or different OSes.
Before, when testing was a big effort before pushing the product out the door, brief testing in each different environment was an OK (but not fantastic) strategy. With incremental development and frequent releases becoming the most popular software engineering model, kneeling and eating our own dog food should become an integral part of all our development and testing strategies.
Comments (3) Permalink
February 5th, 2007 at 6:51 PM
Brilliant idea. That’s so getting imposed at work tomorrow.
February 7th, 2007 at 7:41 AM
Speaking as a mechanical engineer working in a company which produces engineering analysis software, this is a fantastic metaphor.
I’ll have to figure out how to work the phrase into a meeting/conversation now.
D
February 25th, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Glad you like it, lads 🙂
Ben, out of interest, how did it work implementing this idea for webdev?