Extreme dogfooding

http://blog.rainforestqa.com/2013-11-04-extreme-dogfooding/

by smathieu • 13 years ago

57 28 13 years ago

blog.rainforestqa.com

So 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.

fredsters_s7• 13 years ago

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.

bronson• 13 years ago

That sounds exactly like dogfooding to me.

What is regular dogfooding?

sbov• 13 years ago

I assume there's some simple bypass, otherwise this seems like an accident waiting to happen.

wbeckler• 13 years ago

Then I guess we used "extreme dogfooding" with our travel company. We colocated other roles with our offshore developers and we used our own site (http://AllTheRooms.com) to find accommodations for designers and product managers who traveled to be with the devs in Medellin, Colombia.

So, if the site didn't work it would have been pretty painful not having a place to stay.

ukd14• 13 years ago

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.

adrianpike• 13 years ago

This 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'?

fredsters_s7• 13 years ago

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?

delluminatus• 13 years ago

I've been grammar sniped! [0]

Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, this has been a long journey and many things helped us get to this point.

This sentence has a very common grammatical error called a dangling modifier. In this case, notice that the adjective (i.e. noun-modifier) "Confident" is intended to modify the pronoun "us." But, if we look at the sentence, the subject of the sentence is the pronoun "this"! Because introductory phrases (from Confident... to the first comma) are naturally attached to the subject of the sentence, it sounds like the target of "this", namely "the long journey", is the target of the modifier.

Generally you can catch these by reading your work aloud. Once you read, "Confident that [...], this was a long journey...", hopefully it will throw some red flags that this sentence "doesn't make sense." Another technique (of error location) is shortening the sentence to make the error more pronounced: Confident that we're awesome, this journey has taken us far.

Potential rewordings (of many):

It has been a long journey and many things helped us get to a point where we are confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs.

Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, we're reaching a milestone in our long journey.

If we also try to introduce some brevity:

After a long journey, we're confident that our product is fast and accurate enough for real-world QA.

[0] http://xkcd.com/356/

Edited to add: this is meant to be helpful to the poster, who also wrote the post (I assume). It's not a commentary on their product, since as I said, I never did get past the first paragraph.

jlas• 13 years ago

Your comment was thoroughly written and informative, thanks. Not sure why you've been down-voted. Is discussing meta aspects of submissions frowned upon?

I would think blog writers would like to see tips on how to write well.

I'd be interested to see if the author of the original post revises his entry.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

Meta aspects? Ha.

No, being the grammar police is frowned upon.

sashaeslami• 13 years ago

What blog theme did you use for this? I like it.

fredsters_s7• 13 years ago

Thanks Sasha! It's actually custom, based on a bunch of technologies though. I'm going to do a blog post this week about it, and we've open-sourced the template at https://github.com/rainforestapp/middleman-boilerplate. The stack is:

- Scss

- Susy

- Compass

- Haml

- Middleman

- S3

tyleregeto2• 13 years ago

Note to Rainforest team: When I signed up for the free trial I was sent 3 identical confirmation emails. Something going on there.

Overall your product looks good, definitely going to keep it in mind.

ukd14• 13 years ago

Thanks! I'd love to look in to that for you. Could you reply to them and I'll check it out?

tyleregeto2• 13 years ago

Done.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

I like the product, but I think this blog post would've been much more interesting if it wasn't written in a "omg we're so aweome we're using our own product and we wrote a script that makes it difficult not to! disruptive!"-way.

Instead, maybe, what trouble did you have when dogfooding? Did you ever run in the situation that you couldn't proceed because of a bug in the then-being-dogfooded software? How did you get by it? Did engineers like it? How about non-engineer team members? Did the dogfooding influence the way you prioritized?

Sure, I like that the second part of the blog post says "we found some new requirements because of this", but for me, as a programmer of another piece of software, it would've been much more interesting to find out how you got to those requirements and how you dealt with them, rather than what the new requirements were. I mean, every software team finds new requirements all the time.

I mean to be constructive here: I strongly doubt blog posts about how awesome your own tool is and how using it yourself made it awesomer is the best approach. By turning it less into promo and more into general experience-sharing, the post may be more generally useful and thus spread further.

fredsters_s7• 13 years ago

Great feedback dude! Thanks. We will try and take this approach in the future.

Extreme dogfooding

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