Since we are developing software for helping distributed teams collaborate more effectively, it was only natural that we would set up our own team as a distributed one.

Working remotely and relying principally on electronic communications, supplemented by some in-person meetings, has helped us understand better the challenges faced by distributed teams. As we believed from the outset, the biggest challenge has been keeping everyone on the same page in terms of our company strategy: business strategy, marketing strategy, and product roadmap.

Throughout our development process one of us would bemoan the lack of software like Kerika, that could help us build software like Kerika… Once the product became usable enough, we started “dogfooding” it –that elegant phrase invented by Microsoft that refers to a product team “eating it’s own dog food.”

One of the ways in which the Kerika team is using Kerika is for our QA: whenever we decide to work on a bug, we create a new project and name it after that bug number. Inside, we put our Build Verification Test (BVT) as well as the exit (success) criteria for that particular bug. It’s a neat trick: by going through the BVT, which we use as a sanity test before the developers hand off their code for QA, we end up creating a mini Kerika project for each bug.

For example, our BVT requires developers to upload a document to a Kerika page: well, for each bug, we upload a document that represents the exit criteria for that particular bug. The BVT requires users to go through various steps that provide a general coverage of Kerika’s main features. This means logging in using at least 3 different browsers (we usually test with Firefox, Safari and Chrome), and going through the process of adding Web links, videos, etc.

By using Kerika to test Kerika, at the end of each bug’s coding cycle we have a new project that we can look at and see whether it passed the BVT. It’s self-referential: the existence of a correctly set up project, with a particular team consisting of both Team Members and Visitors who perform certain actions, confirms that the BVT passed.

We combine the BVT with the exit criteria for each bug: these are derived from the reproduction steps of the bug report, plus the functional specifications. Going through the exit criteria for a particular bug, we end up with items in that bug’s project folder that confirm whether the bug was successfully fixed.

For example, if there was a bug about embedding YouTube videos on Kerika pages, the exit criteria would be such that at the end of the developer’s testing, the project would contain a YouTube video that could be examined to confirm that the bug was fixed.

So if the project for that bug is set up correctly at the end of the bug-specific repro steps and the BVT, then the developer knows he can check in his code for QA on our test environment. Of course, during our QA cycle we do more extensive testing, but this initial use of Kerika helps developers avoid breaking the build when they check in the code.

Pretty neat way of dogfooding, wouldn’t you agree?