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Software Engineering vocabulary · Agile and Team Workflow

Dogfooding

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈdɔːɡfuːdɪŋ/nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, dogfooding means: The practice of a company using its own product internally, often before release, to find problems and understand the user experience firsthand.

In Turkish: ürünü şirket içinde kullanmak, kendi ürününü kullanma

How it is used

Comes from the phrase eating your own dog food. Common in software companies: we're dogfooding the new version, a dogfooding period. It finds many bugs, but employees are not typical users, so it does not replace testing with real customers.

Example sentences

  1. We've been dogfooding the new calendar for two weeks, and it has already caught three serious bugs.

  2. Dogfooding showed us how annoying the daily notification really is.

Common collocations

  • dogfooding period
  • internal dogfooding
  • dogfood a feature
  • eat your own dog food
  • betaThe stage after alpha when the game's content is complete and the team focuses on fixing bugs and polishing; also a public or closed test of that version.
  • feature flagA setting that turns a feature on or off without deploying new code, so it can be shown to some users, tested in production or switched off quickly.
  • launchThe moment a new product or feature is made available to users, together with the marketing, sales and support activities planned around it.
  • usability testingA research method in which real users try to complete tasks with a product or prototype while a researcher watches, to find out where they struggle.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Agile and Team Workflow

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