Eating Our Own Dog Food
August 6th, 2008Have you ever heard the term “Dogfooding”? Or the phrase, “ABC Company eats its own dog food”?
From Wikipedia:
To say that a company “eats its own dog food” means that it uses the products that it makes. “Dogfooding” is a means of conveying the company’s confidence in its own products.
The phrase originates from old Alpo dog food commercials where the commentator would mention that the dog food is so good that he feeds it to his own dogs.
As we develop web-based applications for clients, we make a concerted effort to use those tools ourselves.
One example is an employee human resource system that was created for a client. The web-based applications enables employees to complete timesheets online, request time off and view their available vacation and sick time. It also enables the company’s management to approve leave requests, view complete histories of every employees timesheets and generate reports.
Shortly after this was launched for the client, we implemented it for Emerge. The application was developed with enough flexibility to accommodate Emerge business policies which were somewhat different than the clients.
The main reason we “eat our own dog food” at Emerge is so we become intimately familiar with the experience of using applications that we develop. We are able to “see” the application from the eyes of a user and not just a developer. Working with our own software everyday provides us an opportunity to think through enhancements and improvements.
