Eating Your Own Dog Food - Introduction

Introduction

Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products. The idea is that if the company expects customers to buy its products, it should also be willing to use those products. Hence dogfooding can act as a kind of testimonial advertising.

InfoWorld commented that this needs to be transparent and honest: "watered-down examples, such as auto dealers' policy of making salespeople drive the brands they sell, or Coca-Cola allowing no Pepsi products in corporate offices... are irrelevant."

One perceived advantage beyond marketing is that dogfooding allows employees to test their company's products in real-life scenarios, and gives management a sense of how the product will be used, all before launch to consumers. In software development, the practice of dogfooding with build branches, private (or buddy) builds, and private testing can allow several validation passes before the code is integrated with the normal daily builds. The practice leads to more stable builds, and proactive resolution of potential inconsistency and dependency issues, especially when several developers or teams work on the same product. For example, Microsoft and Google emphasize the internal use of their own software products. For Microsoft, especially during the development stage, all employees across the corporation have access to daily software builds of most products in development, including the Windows operating system.

The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.