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by James Robertson.
Original Post: why eating your own dogfood matters
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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I'm not making a particularly controversial (or new) statement when I say that when developing some project, having the development team "eat their own dogfood" is a very useful technique. If you are writing an email application, have the developers adopt it for their email. If you are writing an IDE, have the developers use the IDE to write its own next version. Nothing focuses a developer more than the desire to fix something that's annoying them personally.
True, very true. But it's also the case that you need other people eating your dogfood, or else you end up with tools thata suit you and no one else:
There's a flip-side, of course. One example of this is JBoss, and its mass of thinly documented XML configuration files. Of course the developers know exactly how they work. They know where to find everything so they don't find the complexity annoying4. Find that a problem? It's Open Source and you can fix it yourself. However, by the time you know enough about a product to fix a problem like this yourself, you know enough not to be experiencing the problem any more. Hence it falls down the back of your priority list. Catch-22.
I've come across this in BottomFeeder - there's nothing like having other people point out interesting aspects of your software to keep you on your toes. It's all too easy to end up with stuff you (and only you) can use. Go read the whole thing
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