Dogfooding RSinteract

On any software project it’s important for managers to have some sort of system in place to keep track of how long tasks are taking and how much time has been spent collectively on a project. Gathering this data is fairly easy (with the right tool), for RSinteract we have a TimeBooking application written internally that collects the data. It’s fairly simple: client, task, comments, lots of drop downs for each half hour slot in the day. It works.

The problem is getting this data in a useable form to make decision on… but wait! We’re making a reporting tool. What better way to look at our time booking data than in a nicely formatted report!

Here’s an example of my time as booked back in the second week of December. I’ve quickly made a weekly time sheet using our _Reporting view in the time booking database with filters for employee and week commencing. I can now save this and look at anyone’s time for any given week! Clever eh?

Using products internally like this is known in the industry as “dogfooding” as in “eats its own dog food”. This gives us a good idea of how our clients may use the software and also highlights problems that we might not otherwise pick up in our usual testing.