Eating Our Own Dog Food
- April 4th, 2007 /
Last year, I sent an email to our development team encouraging all of us to start “eating our own dog food.” I quickly realized that this American slang didn’t translate well when I got back a puzzled response wondering why one would want to eat their dog’s food? And what did this have to do with software development?
Well, long story short, everything. Eating your own dog food means using your own products. Not just testing your products, but really using them. Microsoft developers have to work on the software they are developing to write code. Imagine how frustrating that must be in the early stages of development (maybe like Vista is right now for me?).
In our case, we recently started a project called the Blake vs Chris Competition. In this, we each are building our own sites using our siteMighty publishing platform, and blogging about what we are doing every step of the way. The goal of this is threefold:
- Proof of concept – Prove that money can be made through a siteMighty website (revealed in real time, in a very naked way through the live-blogging).
- Create an educational resource – Build a training guide by compiling the steps we are going through on our blogs.
- Eat our own dog food – Experience what our users are experiencing and make siteMighty better as a result.
So far, I’ve been learning a ton about the ins and outs of siteMighty just by using it to really try to create a profitable affiliate marketing website. Based on yesterday’s work on Creditmighty.com, I have a yellow note pad filled with three pages of notes.
It is so revealing to be using our product in the same way our users are. This process reveals so much more than normal QA testing. Here are some early thoughts on what I am finding:
- Minor bugs that you gloss over just to push out a release become major frustrations when you encounter them time and time again.
- Navigation ease and UI logic become paramount.
- You get immediate clarity on what features in the development pipeline are important. And more often than not, these aren’t fancy new features, they are the final tweaks and polishing that you haven’t done to an existing feature.
I hope you’ll follow our progress as we eat our own dog food with siteMighty. The Blake vs Chris Completion is taking place at Creditmighty.com and Blakescreditcards.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts on eating our dog food or your own.
- categories: All, SiteMighty /
