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 While the test is still used, it's getting outdated, as many companies are moving to web technologies, and new development tools exist.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."

Comments

Old system is fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the original Joel questions still work fine.
Who needs a distributed source control system if everyone on my team works in the same office.
Also, I don't want end customers submitting directly into my bug tracker. I'm OK with them having a web based way to submit problems, but then QA should verify the defect and translate customer speak into something that makes sense. Then the defect can be entered into bug tracker with a good set of steps to reproduce and given a proper severity. To a customer, everything is critical.

A serious question

[Scareduck]

Has Joel Spolsky done anything that's worth a damn? I am a long-time user of Fogbugz, and can attest to that product's general lack of attention to detail in its design. It's almost as if it were written by people who hated each other and didn't want to communicate. Several of my co-workers attended a release conference with him present, and the uniform reaction I got back from them was that he had moved on from Fogbugz, wasn't interested in the problems we had found in its implementation, and was fascinated by some other product.

But getting back to this, Garcia's list appears to be fairly sound. I have some comments on two of his modified questions:

Do you use a distributed source control system? Why should I care about distributed source code control in a monolithic commercial development environment? I can see its value in a distributed open-source project, but I really don't understand the necessity otherwise.

Do you fix bugs before implementing new features? All bugs? Some bugs? This tells me nothing about prioritization. Sometimes you need to do both at once. Sometimes it's not worth it to fix a bug if the circumstance is rare enough.

Re:Total failure

[Kjella]

Example: Allow users direct access to a bug database? It's hard enough to train testers to give you good bug reports. You won't get anything usable from an end user without some severe filtering.

The question is whether you are better off leaving your users to work out their bug corresponence via mailing lists or email and only let a blessed few enter bug reports, or is it better to have the full case history going all the way back to what the customer actually reported along with any logs or screenshots. Or if you just drop it only the floor saying "LALALALA our software is perfect, all problems are PEBCAK problems."

Personally I'm a big fan of wine appdb's "*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***". If enough people are experiencing a problem, you have a problem whether you get anything useful from the logs or not. Don't forget that crappy bug reports and crappy logging often go hand in hand, when the application just goes boom without giving any useful information about why the developer is just as much at fault for making it impossible to debug.