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Joel Test Updated
An anonymous reader writes "In 2000, Joel Spolsky wrote the Joel Test, an excellent and simple way to evaluate a software company. While the test is still used, it's getting outdated, as many companies are moving to web technologies, and new development tools exist. In his blog, Marc Garcia wrote about what could be an update to Joel Test."
Joel Spolski is a guy who runs a software company, and he used to be a program manager on Excel. However that's not why people give a shit about what he thinks. People read (past tense) his articles because they were pretty good, and explained stuff lots of people in the software business need to know but often don't. For instance if somebody doesn't understand Unicode, I often point them to his article explaining it .... because he did a pretty good job.
The real question is, who is Marc Garcia and why does the article submitter think we should care? In fairness, he says the "updated list" is just his personal opinion rather than something generally applicable, which is good because pretty much every software company I know would fail at least one or two of the points on there, including Google.
There's a difference between getting customer feedback, which is good, and allowing that feedback to go directly into the bug database, an exercise in insanity. How many of those bug reports are going to be accurate and descriptive enough so that whomever gets stuck reading it will actually be able to identify what needs to be fixed, especially if there's not a crash report, or other error messaged included?
Unless your users are professional developers/programmers, the signal to noise ratio is going to be horrid.
Why should I care about distributed source code control in a monolithic commercial development environment?
Aaahhh.. haven't you learned by now that being able to divide concepts recursively is generally a Good Thing (tm)?
Even a monolithic company consists of different workgroups, and the developers in those groups may want to work remotely on some stuff, e.g., when they are on a trip. If it would cost them too much pain to merge in their changes when they're back home, do you think these developers would be thrilled to do said work when they're away?
You could add a question mark at the end, and it would be something a Brit would say: Do your team work in good conditions? They seem to consider collections to be plural, while we Americans consider them to be singular.
SSC