Friday, 2 February 2007
The Importance of Dogfood
So it is no secret that the 1.0 Milestone 7 release is a little late. I knew it probably would be. Mostly we've had lots of bugs pop their head up. I mean we totally reworked the mime parser, imap lexer, web calendar, build, and added a whole new module (the administration tool). Not to mention some pretty cool performance tweaks to the data storage layer. We were bound to have some hiccups. NOTHING makes a bigger difference than "dogfooding" ("eating your own dogfood" == using your own software milestones/builds n your day to day work). Meaning, you can test and QA until you are blue in the face....but noting equals putting that thing into practical use. No motivation like it directly affecting your immediate business and staying up till 4am dealing with the fallout from an upgrade problem. We do this so our users don't have to. We put out builds but the non-milestone builds are installed on buni.org and used to drive our development mail list and email accounts. The release will be built on a series of successful milestone releases. the milestone releases are built on a series of not so successful builds :-). Yay for dogfood!
