Dogfooding

What is dogfooding?

Dogfooding is slang for "eating your own dog food", or using one's own products or services. The meaning of dogfooding (or employee testing) is when a company uses its own products or services to find and resolve bugs. Like customer testing, dogfooding testing provides a much-needed opportunity to iterate on meaningful, real-world product feedback before launch.

Why is dogfooding important?

Getting the product into the hands of your employees and colleagues can have significant benefits to your product, development, and organization. Teams participating in dogfooding testing get an early view of the product to learn about it, understand how they could do their job more effectively by knowing that product, and work with team members to shape the future of the product.

Here are some of the benefits for having an effective dogfooding program:

• Improves product quality through bug discovery
• Allows you to scale quality testing environments with real people
• Leverages internal resources to cut down on development and support costs
• Helps to save time by addressing issues that could delay product release
• Promotes product awareness and knowledge in every corner of the organization
• Establishes a collaborative environment that breaks down departmental silos
• Demonstrates product usefulness and usability to the market