Dogfood
Noun · Verb · Slang & Abbreviations · Origin: 1988
Definitions
Dogfood, or dogfooding, is the practice of a company using its own products internally before or alongside releasing them to customers. The term comes from the idea of a dog food company eating its own dog food to demonstrate confidence in its product. In tech, dogfooding serves multiple purposes: it provides real-world testing that catches issues automated tests miss, it gives employees firsthand experience with the user perspective, and it demonstrates genuine belief in the product. Microsoft is famous for extensive dogfooding, running pre-release Windows builds on employee machines. Google employees use early versions of Gmail, Chrome, and Android features before public release. Dogfooding is particularly valuable for developer tools, where the builders are also the target users. It can reveal usability problems, performance issues, and missing features that might not surface in formal QA testing. The practice creates a tight feedback loop between development and real-world usage, though teams must be careful not to assume their internal use patterns represent all customer scenarios.
In plain English: Using your own product internally before shipping it to customers, so you experience the same bugs and frustrations your users would.
Also used as an adjective: a 'dogfood build' or 'dogfood release' is an internal-only version of software deployed to employees before external release. Google calls these 'dogfood' builds; Microsoft calls them 'self-host' builds.
Example: 'The dogfood build has been running on the team's machines for a week with no crashes. Time to promote it to the beta channel.'
Source: adjective / internal build