While everyone agrees with the value of eating your dog food, some people claim that this principle cannot be applied to all software industries.
Let’s take the Medical Health Care Industry. Who should build software for Doctors and Nurses to be used in the hospital? Its very unlikely that Doctors will start building software in the side. How do apply this principle here?
What we have today is a bunch of people trying to build software for the hospitals (most of them have not clue on how a hospital operates, those who know a little become Subject Matter Experts and take charge). Similarly there are lot of other industries.
You ask their users how they like the software and you would know. Its not that the development team did not do a good job of building the features right or the business did not do a good job of articulating what they want well. Its just that this model is setup for failure.
The Agile community realized that, they need to bring the users in and collaborate with them much more.
The Scrum community identifies one person or a group, call them Product Owner. They are part of the planning meeting, daily scrum and even the retrospectives & demos. Some (0.1%) of teams are able to get actual users during their demo. Are they confused about the PO being their User?
The XP community demands an onsite customer who can guide the team not just during planning, but also during execution. Again the same confusion exists. But the situation is slightly better.
Having said that, I really appreciate XP for pushing the knob on automated testing. Automated Testing (esp. Developer testing) is a great way to eat your own dog food. Remember how useful your API tests have proved to be. Tests are clients to your code and they consume your code by acting as client.
The Design (UX) Community are lot more User focused and tend to spend more time with the actual Users, but that’s very sporadic
The Lean community have realized that they need to have the development team sit with the business in their work area. They have realized that there are a lot of important lessons to learn from the context of the work place.
Personally I think we need to go way beyond this. If you look at some organizations (esp. Web 2.0 companies and Open Source Projects) they are their own Users. We can certainly learn something from them.
How can we do this? Here are some ideas:
At least to start with, have the team members take a formal education in the domain they are building the software. Do some case studies and then, spend quality time with the Users (actual Users). Not just interviewing them, but actually working with them (at least shadowing them or being their apprentice).
Educate the Users more about Software development process and have them work with the team for at least a week or two to under it.
May be hire people who have actually worked in the field. (You want to make sure their knowledge is up-to-date and they actually know the business really well). Also very important to maintain a good ratio. 1 member for a 10 people team is scary.
Build tools that can help the actual end users build/configure their software. As developers we build tools which we use on our own projects. Same tools (which were driven by eating their own dog food) can now be used by others to build their software. For years, creating a web presence for a company was a specialist’s job. Today with Google Apps and others, anyone can set up a website, add a bunch of forms, set up email accounts and all that Jazz. The line between a specialist’ role and a business user is blurring. Coz we have the tools to help. Esp. tools built by people for their personal use.
Again all of this can get you one step closer. But nothing like eating your own dog food.
With TDD, I’m a lot more confident about my solutions. If I spot a design improvement, I can quickly jump in and fix it with confidence. When given feedback, I’m able to respond to it quickly. I feel I’m in control.
It really helps me keep my design and code minimalistic and clean. No bells and whistles. No buy one get one free combo offers. <Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away>
Turns out that my code is lot more easier to test. Because its designed to be testable. Lots of people argue that they will write tests after writing the code and it would be more efficient. The biggest problem I find with this approach is that the code ends up being something not readily testable. Then either I’ve to spend time making it testable or I skip testing saying its not possible or not required.
It helps me build a safety net of executable, living, up-to-date specification for my classes and features. Its a great starting point for new team members to understand my software. Tests are a great reference point for someone who wants to use my code.
TDD is a great teacher. It helps me listen to my code and learn from it. It forces me to pay close attention to what is happening. Its easy to spot bad things faster. Its all about feedback and visibility.
TDD forces me to slow down and think. It encourages me to take baby-steps. Sometimes I find people are in such a hurry that they spill mess all over the place. It takes soo much more time and effort to clean up the mess they leave behind.
My tests tend to communicate my design choices much longer after I’m gone.
I massively reduce the amount of time I spend in the debugger or trying to manually test (monkey test) from the UI. When something breaks, I no longer need to crawl through the logs to figure out where things are going wrong. I get pin-pointed feedback.
TDD helps me maintain focus on measurable outcome (producing software that accomplishes a concrete objective). I’m not longer drifting down ratholes.
TDD also helps me reduce the hand-overs between developers and tests and hence the wastage introduced because of all that overhead and context switching.
And so on…
Having said that, TDD alone is not sufficient to achieve the above. At times you need to spike/prototype things. One needs to have (or at least start focusing on building) a good knowledge of Design Principles and Patterns. Its easy to get lost, having a pair can really help.
Again I don’t want to sound dogmatic. I don’t think TDD is the only way to build great software. There are lots of great developers out there, building amazing software without TDD. However I think TDD is a much easier approach to achieve the same.
Eating your dog food is one of the most important principle (or philosophy if you will) to effectively build software.
Following is a quick list of advantages:
Feedback is a core value of eXtreme Programming and Agile in general. What better way to get feedback other than using your own product?
Number of bugs, eps. show stoppers can be drastically reduced, without huge investment on testing (army of Testers)
You can relate to the product much more, which in turn helps in
Prioritization (features, tech-debt, other activities)
Ability to ask meaningful questions
Find creative ways to thin-slice the system (release frequently),
Great risk reduction strategy
n-fold better UX
From the User’s point of view, chances are the time it takes for them to complete some task would be drastically reduced (including set up time)
High chances of innovation
High chances of finding new feature ideas (while using the product)
Ability to maintain a clear focus
Development process becomes really lean, no threshold to take crap as far as process and tools goes
Motivation and Drive never dries up (unless you are building something that you don’t believe in)
Last but not the least, such projects never fail, coz they at least have one active user
Eat your own dog food principle can be applied at various levels:
Product/Tool level: Using a product to help during its development. On the FitNesse project, we use FitNesse to run acceptance tests for FitNesse with every build. On ProTest project, we use protest to prioritize and execute our tests
User level: Building a product to scratch your personal itch. Most open source projects are a great examples of this.
Organization level: Using products built by the company internally, before releasing it to outside world. At Directi, we use most of the products we build. At Industrial Logic, we use our eLearning platform during our in-person training and coaching.
Community level: Using one’s own philosophy in their work. For example the open source community using open source projects. The Agile community (esp. the coaches) follow their own advice.
I’m thrilled to be back in Bangalore. One thing I really missed in US was the craziness of driving on Bangalore roads. Everything was so systematic, there was no thrill, no excitement, no fun, I would be bored to death. The other day I started to think what did I really like about driving on Indian roads? There was something about driving here, that strikes a chord with the way I work [you would have guess by know, .i.e. develop software]. I concluded that, driving on Indian roads have a lot to do with the way I build/develop software .i.e. using Agile methods. Here are my initial thoughts why I think so…
Chaos from outside : If you are not driving on Indian roads, it looks like the epicenter of chaos and noise. It will take a while for you to figure out why the traffic on the roads are oriented in 360 degrees. Everyone seems to be honking at each other. If you talk to someone who has watched an Agile team work for a week, they can share similar thoughts about chaos and noise. Companies where I have tried to introduce Agile, chaos and noise seems to be one of their top concerns. Once you are part of the system, life is wonderful. Trust me, you will never look back again.
Embrace change : If you drive though a street and come back to it a week later, there is a high probability that the direction in which the traffic flows would be reversed. Changing the directions of one-ways is very common here. Driving 2 wheels with helmets on is another rule that has changed at least 10 times in the last few years. There is a constant evolution. The good thing is folks embrace change and continue with it. Strikes a chord with what happened yesterday during your planning meeting?
Heavy emphasis on open communication and continuous feedback : If you watch people in India drive, you might wonder why they honk continuously and sometimes flash their headlights? Well, that’s our way of communication and feedback. If you watch carefully, the intensity of honking and the frequency of flashing lights varies depending on what one driver is trying to communicate to the other. A gentle honk, means, I’m about to overtake you, watch out. Continuous honking means, move out of my way, you are wasting my time. A gentle flash of light means watch out, I’m behind out. All of us know the importance of open communication and continuous feedback on software projects.
Self organized : If you look at the traffic rules in India, we are not so rigid about the rules. You will find people overtaking from left and right. Sometimes you’ll find group of vehicles jumping the lights when the opposite side is empty. We don’t even have cops standing everywhere with Speed guns. A lot of busy junctions, don’t have cops. People nicely self organize and move on. I believe in self organized teams and I think that is the most effective and scalable way to build software.
Adaptive planning : Its quite common to find one of the roads in your route blocked due to some maintenance work or accident. It very rare you’ll find people waiting for it to clear up. Immediately people find another route and move on. We plan to deliver and not deliver to a plan. Its very rare to find that everything on a software project going according to the plan. Things change, we always have surprises and we learn to adapt and move one. Also note that let it be heavy rains, floods or heavy winds, none of these seem to bring the traffic to a standstill. People adapt and move on.
Stressful and Intense : No doubt driving is a lot of fun, but driving on Indian roads is stressful and can be intense. This is the same feedback I get from people who work on Agile projects. Pair programming session can be quite stressful and intense. Trust me, you’ll feel much more exhausted in 4 hours of pair programming session compared to 10 hours of working on your own. Both of these activities needs a lot of attention and can drain you out soon.
Mitigate risk : From outside, it might feel like driving on Indian roads is very risky. But if you look at the number of deaths caused due to accidents in India, its far less than that caused in US. Please note that number of deaths includes humans and animals. For those who live in suburbs in US, can tell you how many deers they find dead everyday. The trick is with people traveling so close to each other, there are very little chances to be caught by surprise. With constant feedback and continuous collaboration on Agile projects we try to mitigate a lot of project risks. Pair programming and collective ownership is another great way of mitigating the risk of one person being the bottlenecks.
Maximize the throughput : If you notice the number of people that travel through these roads each day, its amazing. Look at the roads, every inch of the road is occupied and sometimes we don’t even spare the footpaths. We like to maximize the usage of the available resources (capacity utilization). But at the same time we focus on making sure we reach home/office fast. (throughput). Every software project tries to maximize its throughput and Agile gives me a great platform to do so.
Minimize the operating cost : I’m not too sure, but my gut feel says the amount of money and effort invested in maintaining and building roads in India is far less than what they do in other countries like US. Also consider the ratio of number of cops to the number of people traveling through these roads; it is very very small. We believe in reducing any form of overhead This is the harsh reality of software projects. But Agile helps me strike a good balance.
Agility [the verb] : With the short distance between the vehicles, one needs to have really good reflexes to survive on Indian roads. Its amazing to see everyone jamming their brakes when something unexpected happens. They recover and move on. Being Agile [verb] is the key to success on a software project.
Having said all this, its always easy to find things that are done quite different in these 2 scenarios. Taking any analogy to an extreme causes more harm than good.
This is the harsh reality of software projects. But Agile helps me strike a good balance.