go ahead, mac my day

a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world
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you don't miss something until it's gone

MSDN Blogs > go ahead, mac my day > you don't miss something until it's gone

you don't miss something until it's gone

12 Sep 2006 11:38 PM
  • Comments 7

One thing that I absolutely love about Microsoft's culture is the concept of dogfood. Dogfood is both a noun and a verb [1]. The basic idea is that, if we produce it, we should use it ourselves so that we know what our users are doing. So I'll refer to PowerPoint dogfood build [whatever] (to specify that I'm currently running the absolute latest build of PowerPoint in all its glory), or I'll say that I'm dogfooding Entourage (so that you know that I'm running the latest and greatest).

Dogfood has its ups and downs. After all, quite a lot of our dogfood is pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha code. In many cases, I'm running things off of our daily builds, which may or may not even launch, let alone be something that I can actually work in. The vast majority of the time they are, sometimes they're not. I'm okay with that because I know what I'm getting into, and I always keep around one build that I know absolutely will work.

Sometimes dogfood happens to you. A couple of weeks ago, I was informed that I would be dogfooding Exchange 2007. Okay, sez I. Exchange is mostly transparent to me, and so long as I receive my email, I'm not sure if there's any way that I could care about what server I'm on. Bring it on.

Of course, this meant that Murphy and his bloody Law set in. I got the particular dogfood build of Exchange that didn't work well with Entourage. You see, I live my life 100% in Entourage. Take a look at my Entourage some day and you'll see what I mean. I've got local folders, and this is where most of my email lives. I keep very little on the Exchange server, since I'm never far from my Mac. I've got projects set up in the Project Centre that help remind me what I'm doing and where I should be. I use categories extensively, and the greatest benefit is that my incoming email is now colour-coded by category of the sender, which means that I can see at a glance what I've got going on. All of these are absolutely essential to my daily life.

When I got the wrong build of Exchange, it's as if the Productivity Fairy came to my office and stopped my life from moving forward. I had to use Outlook on my Windows box. I'm dogfooding Outlook 12, too, and I don't have any particular complaints about it. But it's not Entourage, it's not my home environment, it's not what I know and love. The little things tripped me up, the OS things like the difference between command-C and control-C. I thought I was going to go mad.

Have you ever spent any time in the Outback? I felt like that: they're all speaking the same language, and you're pretty sure that you can understand each individual word that they're saying, but you can't follow what they're saying when they string together all of those individual words.

Today, thanks to the efforts of someone on the Entourage team and someone on the Exchange team, I'm back in Entourage and everything is just working. Thank you for bringing me home. Really. I never realised how much I would miss Entourage, and then one day it just wasn't there. I nearly kissed the screen of my PowerBook when it opened up and Entourage just started downloading my emails.

As I watched my email download, I realised how much I missed Entourage in the week that I lived without it. I wasn't nearly as productive. I forgot to send a status email to my manager, and he gave me some relatively gentle ribbing about forgetting him. I was late to a meeting earlier today because I looked at my not-updated Entourage calendar instead of my Outlook calendar. I felt like I spent the past week just a half-step off from where I should be.

Dear Entourage: I can't live my life without you. Please don't ever leave me again. Love, me.

[1] We're versatile with our parts of speech, you see. I think this means that there's not a linguist anywhere on our team, or at least I haven't seen anyone crying into their beer over what we do to the language.

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Comments
Comments
  • Asam Bashir
    13 Sep 2006 7:46 AM
    No MacBook Pro rev 2 aka Marvin the 10th :(

    http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/sep_2006/event/index.html
  • John C. Welch
    13 Sep 2006 7:54 AM
    That reminds me of my first email ever with Entourage...well Alpaca really:

    "You can't have it back. The only way you're getting this program out of my hands is to take it from my cold, dead, fingers. No cancelling this one. Ever."

    Now, just to be REEEEEALLY bad, I give you...CINDERELLA!

    http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=391453&s=143441&i=391433
  • Stephen Mackenzie
    13 Sep 2006 11:35 AM
    That would be the *evil* productivity fairy, surely?
  • 13 Sep 2006 12:18 PM
    Not all fairies are good fairies!  They can be quite mischievious.
  • eponymous coward
    13 Sep 2006 2:35 PM
    Getting to be on a daily build for something quite critical for workflow (at Microsoft, that would be your email server or client) can be a thrilling experience (and I don't mean that entirely positively).

    The projects I was in, it was Very Bad Form to break things for dogfooding, as we were expected to use the daily build. (We intentionally did it once for about 3 months while we completely reworked the UI for some stuff- and even then you could still partially use it). I can probably count the number of bad builds completely unsuitable for dogfooding I was exposed to on two hands, in a decent number of multiple years.

    (From this, you should be able to figure out I never worked on Windows or Windows Office at Microsoft. ;)
  • 13 Sep 2006 2:56 PM
    It's generally considered to be bad form to break things for a widely-available dogfood.  

    In MacBU, we don't seem to encourage people to run the daily builds; anyone who does so knows that they're on the bleeding edge and might pay the price of doing so.  My laptop is always running what's currently available to our end users; it's my Mac Mini back in my office that's running the latest-and-greatest.

    I have to admit that I'm not dogfooding Vista, but I'll probably start doing so soon-ish.
  • eponymous coward
    13 Sep 2006 7:06 PM
    In MacBU, we don't seem to encourage people to run the daily builds; anyone who does so knows that they're on the bleeding edge and might pay the price of doing so.

    My groups were kinda hardass on the topic of ANY build should be dogfood-quality, and if it wasn't, unless there were special circumstances, you were in for some razzing if you checked things in to break the build/didn't test correctly to make sure it was OK for dogfood. It also helped that one of the groups I worked for was very much in a extreme programming/iterative milestone mindset on a formal basis, and the other ones, while not explicitly taking the XP route, sort of informally having procedures similar to that that helped keep the accumulation of heinous bugs down- really extensive buddy testing between developer and test on risky checkins and very good rapport overall, and test teams that knew the product upside down and backwards.

    Watefall programming and letting bugs pile up while you do feature work sucks, IMO- and generally, my experience is that development under this model is where you generally CAN'T dogfood the daily build. WinOffice was like this, though this was changing at later points: it would be MONTHS into a cycle before they'd give green lights to dogfooding software. Quality IS a feature, just like everything else you plan on adding to your product, and you should be spending regular time adding in bugfixes and stabilizing build quality instead of features and critical fixes first, THEN dealing with the huge-ass pile of bugs at the end. ;)

    Then again, we didn't have some of the heinous dependencies other projects had (note my reference to Vista, WinOffice), and I could imagine MacOffice might have those issues as well. Those certainly make things more complex.
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