Eat your own neXboard

“Eat your own dogfood” has been a popular mantra in the software development community for decades. We believe it is still a valuable attitude that can help you advance your product. The phrase is said to have been coined by Microsoft during their development of Windows NT, where they strongly encouraged internal usage of the new operating system. The main objective is to increase product quality by integrating feedback from team members and other co-workers. In this post I will give a brief glance into our experience with “dogfooding” at neXboard, and what benefits it had on our development process.

Collaboration

Our product neXboard originated from the methods of design thinking. We expanded it to serve a broader audience and by now it can be used for a wide variety of collaborative tasks. Software development requires a lot of collaboration from different parties. Therefore, we are in the lucky position that our product is actually very useful for many of our everyday tasks at the office. Once we realized this, we integrated neXboard step by step in different processes.

We started off by using neXboard to document meetings and generally share knowledge inside and between teams (this includes the neXboard team as well as other teams at neXenio). Once everyone got comfortable with using our tool, we came up with additional use cases. Our agile scrum-like development process, for example, contains retrospective meetings for each team every other week. Often some team members cannot take part at these meetings. Preparing and documenting the key takeaways with neXboard gives everyone the chance to participate regardless of their presence. To increase efficiency we also created new board templates (for instance for retrospective meetings), which since have also been integrated in the live version.

Besides supporting our processes we also noticed some other advantages. Early into the process colleagues started to report bugs, some of which had existed unnoticed for a while. Moreover, when we released new features co-workers at the office pointed us to errors and inconsistencies before customers even had a chance to run into them. This enabled us to resolve problems much faster and without customers being bothered.

Emphasizing

Another probably underestimated aspect of dogfooding is an increased emphasis with the users. As a software engineer it is easy to get detached from the user needs and lose yourself in technical details. This is a risky path to walk on, since in the end it’s not the awesome new javascript framework that ensures your salary keeps coming in, but paying customers. During our own user journey through neXboard we discovered some missing features, for example the possibility to undo edits. The undo feature had been in our backlog for a while, but there had always been other things that were prioritized higher. Embarking on the user journey brought multiple team members to realize how painful it is not to have this functionality. Thus, the team favored it in the plannings and we are happy that the first version just got released.

Core Benefits

It took a while to get everyone on board, but I think it is safe to say the results have been encouraging at least. Since we established the internal use of neXboard thanks to the short feedback cycle we are able to reduce the bugs in production, discover new use-cases and generally emphasize with users. We are aware that we as software engineers are not a perfect representation of our user group (and will use neXboard differently than them). Therefore, dogfooding does not replace user research and testing, but is a good additional measure to improve the quality of our product.

Especially as a backend-focused engineer, I find it quite helpful to have usage of the product I am building integrated in my work routine. It gives me the chance to keep track of the current state of the product on a more abstract level. And, possibly most importantly, it is a recurring reminder that at the end of the day you are not working mainly for technical advances, but for features which add value for the customers.

If you are curious about whether neXboard could help you with your product development give it a try here. Test accounts are free for 30 days!