Eat Your Own Dog Food

We are commonly advised that companies, and software developers, should eat their own dog food. This means that we should have to use the things we provide. I often wish that airline executives were required to sit in the worst seat, on the longest flight, three or four times a month, eating a dry sandwich, and climbing over two large people to get to the restroom. I think it would improve flying tremendously.

With the XML Notepad, we would have benefited from using it more. I did use it a few times, but until very close to the end, it wasnt as capable as my macros in TextPad and it seemed not to make sense to use it. Had I used it, however, I would surely have found issues and changed priorities.

As programmers, we are often unable to eat our own dog foodwe have no use whatsoever for the programs we are called upon to write. Thats another reason why its so important to have an XP customer, a team member who does need the resulting program and who can eat the dog food as soon as we create it.