Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and a way to test it in real-world usage.

While at Microsoft, Maritz was credited with originating the term "eating your own dogfood" also known as dogfooding.

Dogfooding may be unrealistic, as customers will always have a choice of different companies' products to use together, and the product may not be used as intended.

The SBT project uses SBT to build itself, and considers that dogfooding is a positive feature.

The risks of public dogfooding, specifically that a company may have difficulties using its own products, may reduce the frequency of publicized dogfooding.

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product.

Dogfooding When feasible and appropriate, employ the work product of Identity Commons working groups to facilitate the operation and interaction of Identity Commons itself.

Dogfooding may happen too early to be viable, and those forced to use the products may assume that someone else has reported the problem or they may get used to applying workarounds.

One perceived advantage beyond marketing is that dogfooding allows employees to test their company's products in real-life scenarios, which gives management a sense of how the product might be used - all before launch to consumers.

In 2009, the new CIO of Microsoft, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" was unappealing and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing products as "ice cream that our customers want to consume."

In 1997, an email storm known as the Bedlam DL3 incident made Microsoft build more robust features into Microsoft Exchange Server to avoid lost and duplicate emails and network and server down-time, although dogfooding is rarely so dramatic.