Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising.
Why do they call it dogfooding?
Why “dogfooding?” The term comes from a well-known 1976 television spot for Alpo dog food, starring actor Lorne Greene. By feeding Alpo to his own dog in the commercial, it's become the symbol (and the namesake) for trialing a product internally before it goes to market.
What is dogfooding in development?
Dogfooding is short for "Eating your own dog food," which represents the practice of using your own products. For software developers, that means working with, as a real user, the applications you're building, or at least working closely with people who do use it.
What does Fishfooding mean?
Fishfooding is a more nuanced version of dogfood for a much smaller selection of testers for a much earlier product. To fishfood a product or use a product in fish food is common at Google, the only place I've heard the term regularly used.
What is the dogfooding test?
During product development, dogfooding performs the function of testing (to some extent) and helps to detect errors, inconsistencies, and bugs before the product is released. After the release, dogfooding serves to show the company's confidence in the product they have created.
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