Extreme dogfooding
blog.rainforestqa.com
Extreme dogfooding
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#2So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#3So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.
The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#4So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.
Most people don't do it to the extent it stops deploys working. We wanted to as if it's painful for us, it would be painful for our customers.
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#5So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.
The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.
That sounds exactly like dogfooding to me.
What is regular dogfooding?
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#6This seems pretty interesting, but even after reading through your docs, I'm left with a few questions.
How long am I going to wait to get a tester? Does this change over the course of a day? Do you use more than one tester to consider something a 'fail'?
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#7This seems pretty interesting, but even after reading through your docs, I'm left with a few questions. How long am I going to wait to get a tester? Does this change over the course of a day? Do you use more than one tester to consider something a 'fail'?
Hey Adrian, Fred, co-founder here. Yeah, our docs need some love :)
It's totally seamless, so as soon as you run a test we allocate (multiple) human testers automatically and your results come back within 30 mins on average. The median time to being allocated a first tester for a test is (in the last 30 days) is 2min 29s.
We have a massive crowd of testers available, so in general response time is fairly consistent.
The majority of our tech is on the backend for scoring and sorting results and testers. There's a bunch of sorting that happens in the background between a tester submitting a 'result' and Rainforest verifying that result and returning it to the customer.
Does that answer your questions?
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.
That sounds exactly like dogfooding to me. What is regular dogfooding?
In regular dogfooding, you would give up if your product was so bad it prevented you from working on anything. I think the extreme here means they are trying to make failures as painful for themselves as possible, even if doing so makes it harder to resolve those failures.
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.
That sounds exactly like dogfooding to me. What is regular dogfooding?
It's probably instructive to think about the type of product that you'd be dogfooding.
For most startups, dogfooding is a process of heavily using your own product to figure out what works and what doesn't and better understand the painpoints in the product from your customer's perspective.
That process changes quite significantly - what we're calling 'extreme' dogfooding - when the product you are dogfooding is a crucial part of your build process, because you cannot deploy if the product isn't working properly, whereas with most products that aren't developer tools a problem found through dogfooding isn't going to do something as drastic as preventing your deploy :)
Re: Extreme dogfooding
#10So hold on, I don't understand why you're calling it extreme, seems just like what everyone else would do to get their product working.
The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.
I assume there's some simple bypass, otherwise this seems like an accident waiting to happen.