Should you dogfood your own project that you are developing? The answer is probably yes, especially if you have no clear cut requirements from the stakeholder in a project with a greenfield for development. There is a lot to be said about having a working implementation that can be presented and refined.
Sometimes the project that you are working on won’t have clear requirements for implementation, so you should probably take basic assumed cases and run with it. Starting early to see what works and what doesn’t work is a pragmatic approach which the waterfall crowd might not like. But hey, an implementation speaks for itself.
If you don’t use what you develop, then it is very hard to relate to the customer/end-user in the long run. On the note of dogfooding your own work, sometimes best-practice might cost too much in terms of time and money, sometimes good-enough practice might just be enough to deliver a functioning product.
Accelerating development by dogfooding your own work and using good-enough practices should increase throughput of development, but not necessarily quality. Again in a greenfield project where there aren’t many requirements due to the schedule, it’s worth taking this approach until hard requirements get delivered.
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See Also
- enabling latent semantic indexing for octopress
- why linux isnt the only platform to target when building applications
- cports for building applications and libraries for hpc systems
- red hat enterprise linux life cycle extended to ten years