[6][7] InfoWorld commented that this needs to be a transparent and honest process: watered-down examples, such as auto dealers' policy of making salespeople drive the brands they sell, or Coca-Cola allowing no Pepsi products in corporate offices … are irrelevant.
The practice enables proactive resolution of potential inconsistency and dependency issues, especially when several developers or teams work on the same product.
The software was initially crash prone, but the immediate feedback of code breaking the build, the loss of pride, and the knowledge of impeding the work of others were all powerful motivators.
[16] "Microsoft's use of Windows and .NET would be irrelevant except for one thing: Its software project leads and on-line services managers do have the freedom to choose."
[21] Government green public procurement that allows testing of proposed environmental policies has been compared to dogfooding.
[27] After the CrowdStrike outages in July 2024, CEO Adam Meyers testified before the US Congress that "dogfooding" (increasing its internal testing before deployment) was one measure the company had put in place to prevent future problems.
[29] Dogfooding may happen too early to be viable, and those forced to use the products may get used to applying workarounds or may assume that someone else has reported the problem.
If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.In 2007, Jo Hoppe, the CIO of Pegasystems, said that she uses the alternative phrase "drinking our own champagne".
[31] Novell's head of public relations Bruce Lowry, commenting on his company's use of Linux and OpenOffice.org, said that he also prefers this phrase.
[32] In 2009, the new CIO of Microsoft, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" was unappealing and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing products as ice cream that our customers want to consume.
[33] A less controversial and common alternative term used in some contexts is self-hosting, where developers' workstations would, for instance, get updated automatically overnight to the latest daily build of the software or operating system on which they work.