Current mood:	energetic
Current music:	So Gently We Go - I Mother Earth
Entry tags:	vmware

Mmmm... dogfood!
To eat one's own dogfood is an expression used to describe the process of using internally the products that are normally sold to customers. At VMware we periodically hold dogfood days for specific products or features before dispatching them to our external beta testers.

Yesterday we held one for the feature that I've been working on for the past year or so. We set up a dogfood lab with a few machines running either Ubuntu Linux 6.06 or Windows XP Pro configured for using the feature and had a batch of VMs available locally on each system for getting broad coverage of the guest platforms we suspect will be popular. Some people from around the various Palo Alto buildings came in and spent a few hours playing with the software while others followed our online instructions to test the feature out on their own desktops. They were each supposed to record a journal of their experiences and thoughts as they used the software and hand those to us at the end.

We got quite a bit of useful and enlightening feedback for improving the feature, some of which I'd been wondering about myself and some of which had escaped me entirely. We'll probably hold another dogfood day for all of Workstation 6.0 in the near future and include this feature as part of that once I've had a chance to address some of the issues that were raised this time.