Jan Schulz-Hofen on January 20, 2015 Dogfooding. Why Planio does not have feature XYZ.
Legend has it that the President of Kal Kan Pet Food ate a can of his company's dog food in front of everybody each year at their shareholder meeting.
(Image by Lisa Yarost, CC BY 2.0)
While we're (luckily!?) not in the business of pet food, we at Planio are strong believers in the "Eat your own dog food" paradigm: We use all the components of Planio ourselves every day.
From agile project management to issue tracking, from hosted Git repositories to documentation in wiki pages. We even use Planio exclusively for our customer support help desk and we're dropping DropboxTM (no pun intended) in favor of Sparkleshare.
In fact, this is how we built - and are still building - Planio. For a couple of months now, we're signed in round the clock (most of us via IRC) to our internal Planio Team Chat - a feature we're excited to be releasing to customers later this year.
Dogfooding helps us make Planio more awesome each day. Our release cycles allow us to find problems, fix them and ship updates to all customers in a matter of minutes, not hours - not days.
But that's also the reason why Planio does not have some features (yet). When we don't have a genuine use for something ourselves, we will probably not build it. Dogfooding is a too important part in our quality assurance.
How are you testing your company's products? Are you eating your own dog food? Tell us in the comments!
