Dogfooding

also called eat your own dog food

Using your own product to do real work, before your customers have to. Not a demo account — the actual work of the company, with the actual consequences of it being broken.

The phrase is ugly and the practice is unmatched. Nothing else surfaces the papercuts: the button that is two clicks too far, the empty state that gives no hint, the flow that works only if you already know the answer. Those never appear in a bug report, because a customer who hits them quietly leaves.

It only counts when the pain is yours. A team that files issues against its own product and then ships around them with a spreadsheet is not dogfooding, it is testing. The test is whether the product being bad today makes your day worse today.

The limitation worth naming: you are an expert user with unusual patience, so you will not feel the onboarding cliff a new team hits in week one. Dogfooding tells you what is annoying, not what is confusing. Both need finding, by different means.

In practice

RelayWork’s own features are specified in RelayWork, gates and all — which is how the gate rules got fixed before customers met them.

Backfill
A one-off pass that fills in data the new code expects but the old data lacks — running the new logic across everything that already exists.
Drift
When two things that should agree quietly stop agreeing — the doc and the code, the counter and reality, staging and production.

All 43 terms · How spec-driven development works