Eating Your Own Dogfood

For the past six months or so, we’ve been running MySQL 5.1 for various internal and external applications. MySQl 5.1 has been in beta for quite some time and as we move closer to a GA release, I believe its important for us to “eat our own dogfood” by running the software for most, if not all, of our applications. (The reason it’s not all is that I don’t have control over all of ’em, but that’s a different story.)

Of course, eating your own dogfood is not an entirely pain-free experience, but the idea is that we should be aware of any issues before customers are. Early adopters who used 5.1 a year ago probably suffered more in the process –but they also helped us find bugs. So our bug tracking system, our web site, our forums, several of our customer support systems are all running MySQl 5.1. In fact over the last several weeks we had many of these applications upgrade to our latest release, 5.1.22, an RC or Release Candidate version. Our web team found a few bugs in using replication between different systems and those were quickly fixed.

By putting out 5.1.22 as an RC, we’ve gotten more feedback from our testers, which is good. We’ve found some additional bugs we weren’t aware of, which helps us continue to improve the quality. And if it takes us a while longer to fix more bugs, then that’s what we’ll do. But its great to have the combination of internal and external testing. That’s one of the things that many closed source companies are starting to learn from open source.

If you’re in the business of building software, I think that the principle of eating your own dogfood is a good one to make sure that you are experiencing things just as your users would.