Eating your own dog food, also known as dogfooding, is when a company uses the products it makes. Some companies, like Google and Microsoft, are known for promoting the internal use of their own software – and there are good reasons why. It’s a way to prove your offerings are fit for use, to show confidence in your own technology, and can be a great learning experience.
I’d like to share a Geosoft ‘dogfooding' experience with you. As part of our Quality Assurance process, we have deployed our own geospatial server and search technologies (DAP, Seeker) with data management best practices - to make data sourcing more efficient when conducting QA activities.
Over the past year, we’ve gone from having multiple data stores and fragmented data processes, within Quality Assurance, to having a centralized data store to house all the exploration data that we use for new development, automated and manual release testing. We were also able to enrich the information available for data, by deploying metadata tools that enabled us to enter metadata where we can add pertinent information on what testing routines the dataset will support.
The experience has been rewarding, and it’s resulted in internal efficiencies, as well as opportunities to improve quality assurance. Since we are now actively using five Geosoft technologies in our daily activities, our hands on experience has improved our ability to continually assure the quality of the Geosoft products. We are able to work with and report back on existing bugs or workflow issues to help improve customer workflows going forward. We can upgrade the technologies to the next Geosoft version before they are released to the general public and thus address any new regression type bugs or issues that may have not been caught by our release and automated test harnesses.
We are truly eating our own dogfood - and happy to be doing it!
