Company
Date Published
Author
Sherief Abul-Ezz
Word count
1178
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The concept of dogfooding, also known as "eating your own dogfood," involves using a product in its current state to gain insights into its strengths and weaknesses, with the ultimate goal of improving it for end-users. However, there are risks associated with dogfooding, such as aligning with the wrong target audience, increased familiarity with the product, bias, over-reliance on dogfooding, once-in-a-lifetime scenarios, specialized software, and immature products. It is essential to mitigate these risks by defining a target audience, soliciting feedback from users, following up with beta testing, and being aware of one's own biases. Dogfooding can be an effective way to improve app quality, but it should not replace proper QA testing, and its results should be put in perspective.